Category: Apologetics

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 6

Should you enjoy it while you can? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Chapter 11 of Ecclesiastes is short so we’ll wrap it up with the last few verses today.

7 Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.

8 So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.

9 Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

10 Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.

The first one is easy enough to see. It’s pleasant to see the things of this world. We should never forget the value of sight and especially of beauty. God created a world full of beautiful things, things that reflect His nature as the being of supreme beauty.

Often, the Teacher is depicted as negative, but in many ways, he is positive as well. He encourages joy in life while you have it. However, he could be saying here to not take it for granted. Yes. You have lived a long life. However, when your time comes, you will be dead for much longer.

This could be a good point to talk about the resurrection. Ecclesiastes seems to have no hope of resurrection in it. My contention is this book is a sort of reductio that the Teacher is given based on what God had revealed at the time. We could say that this book actually points us to the necessity of Christ.

So what is going on is that if you have just wisdom, you can’t get the doctrine of the resurrection from that. You could get the hope, but not the promise of it. There are some doctrines about God, such as the Trinity, that you cannot get from reason alone. Sitting on your armchair thinking all day will not get you to the fact that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity and died and rose again.

Moving on, the Teacher encourages the young man to enjoy his life again, but there is a caution here. Jews knew that God will judge you when your time comes. So if you want to go out there and fool around, you can do that, but you will have to give an account to God of what you did while in the body.

Vexation can refer to anger or grief or sorrow. Perhaps we should take it to refer to any strong emotion that can be destructive. There is a time and place for it, but it should not be allowed to control us. Youth often leads to vanity, as many of us remember when we were younger and as many parents of younger children know today.

Next time, we start the final chapter.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 5

How should you invest? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We start Ecclesiastes 11 with the first six verses:

Cast your bread upon the waters,
for you will find it after many days.
2 Give a portion to seven, or even to eight,
for you know not what disaster may happen on earth.
3 If the clouds are full of rain,
they empty themselves on the earth,
and if a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.
4 He who observes the wind will not sow,
and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

5 As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.

6 In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

I’m not one much for taking risks. Putting yourself out there is difficult. Even in my gaming, I will often take the most defensive strategy that I can in facing an opponent. If I am going to stick my neck out for something,

I’m not sure if the Teacher would agree. The impression I get is he is saying to go ahead and take a chance. Cast your bread on the water and see if it comes back to you. You don’t know what could go wrong so what’s the point in hoarding what you have?

Some could look at verse 5 and say we do know now how a baby’s body is formed in the womb, but while we do and they didn’t, I think the text is also asking about how the baby’s soul comes to be in the body. Even that is debated. Some people are physicalists even in the Christian tradition who say we don’t have a soul. Some think God creates the soul when a new baby is conceived, and some think the soul comes about through the mingling of the bodies somehow. Me? I go for either of the latter one, though there’s no hill I’m willing to die on.

There are aspects of life God will always know and we will not and we can leave those in His hands. At the same time, I am hesitant when I am at any church and I hear people claim that they know what God was doing in such a situation. How? Because it had a good outcome so that means God was directly micro-managing it behind the scenes? You don’t know that. We should always be cautious when it comes to proclaiming what God has done or said.

That being said, if you do make an investment, do your part to work at it if you can. Don’t let it go to waste. Work diligently and if you benefit from it, rejoice, but keep in mind everything is in the hand of God and you do not have any guarantees in this.

Work your money wisely. Make the most of it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 4

What kind of leaders should you have? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We finish off Ecclesiastes with a look at verses 16-20 today.

Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child,
and your princes feast in the morning!
17 Happy are you, O land, when your king is the son of the nobility,
and your princes feast at the proper time,
for strength, and not for drunkenness!
18 Through sloth the roof sinks in,
and through indolence the house leaks.
19 Bread is made for laughter,
and wine gladdens life,
and money answers everything.
20 Even in your thoughts, do not curse the king,
nor in your bedroom curse the rich,
for a bird of the air will carry your voice,
or some winged creature tell the matter.

Here, the Teacher talks about the kind of government that a country can thrive under. If you have a leader who has no business being on the throne and takes time to feast and celebrate when they should be working, you’re gonna suffer for it. Note also that the passage does not condemn feasting. There is a time and place for feasting. It is also not to be done just to get drunk, but it is to be done to build up strength.

However, if you have people that are lazy, then do not expect the system under them to thrive. While one could think about this relating to house repairs, it could also speak of government as a house. If the leaders of a government are not responsible, then bad things will happen and it is the people who will suffer.

There are many resources that are here to help us out, but here, we could be seeing some cynicism on the part of the Teacher. If a leader just cares about food and drink, then again, the people will suffer. If all he cares about is building up his bank account, well money will be the answer to all of his problems, but it will cause others to just suffer more. When a leader has the proper attitude, his most important desire is for the benefit of the people that he is there to serve, a lesson that sadly Solomon’s own son didn’t learn. There’s a reason that I call him Bonehead Rehoboam.

So you have an awful government. Be careful who you talk about that to. If you are speaking too loudly and/or to the wrong person, word could get back and you will find yourself in danger. It would be interesting to know what the Teacher would say today if he could see an age where a person can make a post on social media and instantly have their lives ruined as a result. Make a comment that you shouldn’t make and there are countless people who can see it and respond to it.

Only the government under God through King Jesus is perfect. Every other government involves some tradeoffs of some sort. Citizens should be informed and seek to have wise leaders who will rule justly.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 3

Will a fool not stop yapping? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Usually, I try to make my posts here of sufficient length, but not too long. There are many people who have a surprising ability to say a lot of words and still say nothing. The Teacher talks about such people in Ecclesiastes 10:12-15.

The words of a wise man’s mouth win him favor,
but the lips of a fool consume him.
13 The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness,
and the end of his talk is evil madness.
14 A fool multiplies words,
though no man knows what is to be,
and who can tell him what will be after him?
15 The toil of a fool wearies him,
for he does not know the way to the city.

The passage starts off talking about wisdom, but then it stops talking about wisdom. The rest of this is about the fool. When a fool says something, his lips consume him. There’s a reason to let your words be few as was said in Ecclesiastes 5. If your words are few, you will be less likely to have any to hang yourself with.

The problem is that the fool often tends to keep going on and on with what he says. In apologetics, I encounter a lot of people who like to say a lot of things and in the end the one thing they cannot say is any admission that they are wrong on anything, even if it is demonstrably shown to them. People have a strange way of thinking that saving face means not admitting any error on your own part.

Sadly, we all engage in behavior like this. Owning up to mistakes is difficult in the Christian world especially. It’s a shame that in a belief system that celebrates grace, we expect to find very little of it in our churches. We think we will be judged immediately.

It’s not just in our churches. It’s also on social media. People will only put forward their best side normally. Anything that could show a flaw or anything of that sort is kept hidden. It’s a sort of airbrush society where we try to live like we do not have any flaws.

We all do. It’s one reason on social media I have tried to be upfront about the pain of divorce. It shows other men that they are not alone.

The Teacher still has one more barb to throw at the fool in this passage. The fool can work, but he doesn’t see the point. In the end, he is so dumb he cannot even find his own way home. This could easily say something to our entitlement culture that thinks they are owed more and more from people and have to give back less and less. Our society does not understand the value of work and does not understand what it means to earn something.

Let your words be few and learn the value of your work. Do not be a fool.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 2

How do you make an entrance? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Tonight, we look at Ecclesiastes 10:8-11.

He who digs a pit will fall into it,
and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall.
9 He who quarries stones is hurt by them,
and he who splits logs is endangered by them.
10 If the iron is blunt, and one does not sharpen the edge,
he must use more strength,
but wisdom helps one to succeed.
11 If the serpent bites before it is charmed,
there is no advantage to the charmer.

Of course, there could be reasons to dig a pit, such as trying to catch an animal, but many times, a pit would be dug by humans hoping to trap other humans. This could be simple robbery even just to get a victim to a place where they can easily get what he has. In this case, it can be a sort of Wile E. Coyote event where the trap you set ends up coming back on you.

The same could be said about breaking through a wall, unless of course, you’re the Kool-Aid man. Don’t be surprised if there is a trap waiting for you as well. A person who was breaking through a wall would not normally be entering a hosue the proper way and thus likely having something like burglary in mind. So your sins will find you out, eh? How does that help us?

Except, sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men can go wrong. Many of us probably remember the news story a few year ago about the miners who got trapped in a shaft. Were they doing anything wrong? No. They were doing their jobs and disaster struck. There is no guarantee that because you are doing good that you will avoid suffering.

That’s a lesson we all need to learn.

We should not be surprised when the Teacher goes back to one of the points he wants to emphasize. Wisdom. If you go to work and your tool is defective, you will not be likely to succeed. Treat your tools right and you will be better able to do a job. Treat them poorly and you will need a lot more work from the same tool in order to complete the task.

This is especially so in cases where one is put in a dangerous situation. He is not saying anything against snake charming because he considers it dangerous, but because it is an example his readers would understand. If a serpent bit a man before the charming was done, then there would be no profit to the worker. What good does it do to aim to do a task if you are unable to complete it and will suffer loss?

Wisdom again. How one approaches their work should be met with wisdom. Again, this does not guarantee a lack of suffering in the process, nor does it guarantee success, but it sure will make it far more likely that you will succeed and succeed without suffering.

Isn’t that what we want?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Where Do Kings Belong?

What is the proper order of things? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So the final “Under the sun” quotation shows up in Ecclesiastes 10:5-7.

5 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, as it were an error proceeding from the ruler: 6 folly is set in many high places, and the rich sit in a low place. 7 I have seen slaves on horses, and princes walking on the ground like slaves.

I wrote about this that:

The final under the sun comes in Ecclesiastes 10:5. Here, the Teacher describes errors that come from rulers. He describes several political realities such as those who devise schemes and have them backfire on them and people in positions that they ought not. At this point, the book contains several aphorisms on how life works, all of which take place under the sun.

Now some people today would look at this and say “The rich are being lowered and the princes are suffering. The slaves are exalted! Life is good!”

Not so in the ancient world. In the ancient world, this meant that order had been turned upside down and a society thrived on order. If a society has reached this point, it is not a cause for celebration. It is a cause for mourning.

This does not mean that evil rulers should never be cast down. Of course not! Even in Scripture many time an evil ruler was shut down for what he was doing in his society. Scripture regularly celebrates the casting down of the wicked and the lifting up of the righteous.

It does mean that in general, the way it is is that kings and princes should rule and the slaves should be serving them. This does not mean that slavery should be celebrated for all time. It does mean that in the society that the Teacher lived in, this was how order was maintained. Each person knew the role that he was meant to fulfill in society and when he stayed in his lane as it were, society functioned better.

In our day and age, we have the opposite going on. Because someone is of a lesser position, then somehow, they are automatically righteous. If someone is in a higher position, then somehow they are automatically wicked. Of course, there is the exception of whether we like the person who is rich or if we don’t like the person who is poor.

The rich often lead because they have the money to get to such a position. It doesn’t always happen that way as Esther and Joseph became leaders in the Old Testament without being rich first, but then when they got to their positions, they were certainly wealthy people.

In the New Testament, we can see that if someone is a slave, if they can get a chance to obtain their freedom, they should do so. For us, we should do what we can to improve ourselves, but wherever we are in this life, we should strive to find joy and to serve God to the best of our ability.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Ecclesiastes Aphorisms Part 1

What are some tidbits of wisdom? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We are now in the tenth chapter of Ecclesiastes and much of what we read from this point on will be aphorisms.

Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a stench;
so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.
2 A wise man’s heart inclines him to the right,
but a fool’s heart to the left.
3 Even when the fool walks on the road, he lacks sense,
and he says to everyone that he is a fool.
4 If the anger of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your place,
for calmness will lay great offenses to rest.

With verse 1, the message is that you can have one of the best products out there, but if it comes with the tiniest bit of stench to it, it will overpower the whole thing. We should all strive to have wisdom and honor, but we must be cautious because the tiniest bit of folly can overpower that. In a recent post, I mentioned how this has happened with people like Ravi Zacharias, although in that case that goes beyond a little folly. The CEO that went to a Coldplay concert made a mistake of being in public with a mistress and now has resigned in disgrace.

For verse 2, I usually like to joke and say that this is one of my favorite biblical passages about politics, but that is not what is going on here. The text has no idea about terms like right-wing or left-wing. It does not have an idea of right vs left in that right means correct. What it means is simpy that a wise person normally chooses the correct path and the foolish person chooses the wrong when presented with a binary.

This continues in verse 3. At one point, it becomes clear that the fool has chosen the wrong path. Nevertheless, he still persists in saying that he is a fool by continuing down that path. Lewis once said that if you are going down the wrong way, the correct way to progress is to turn around and go back to where you started and then take the correct path. Unfortunately, there are times people cannot help but realize that they have made the wrong choice, but will continue because they think that they are saving face. Unfortunately, everyone around them can see that they have made the wrong choice.

For the last verse for today, it could mean to not react in panic to a ruler acting suddenly on a whim of irrational thinking. Reacting in such a way could give credence to a claim that a ruler has made against you. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it could be best at times to take a “wait and see” approach to what is going on. We could think of the adage of haste makes waste. There are times when a hasty reaction has cost us greatly when we would have best been served by just waiting things out.

Next time, we’ll encounter the final “under the sun.”

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Be Thankful for Good Parents

Are good parents a gift? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I usually write these a few days in advance. This blog is a break from Ecclesiastes. Tonight, I was playing through Persona 5 Strikers where the heroes go into the cognitive world of the villains and find out a major influence on the evil that these villains do is unresolved trauma in their past. In this case, it was a villain whose past had him being an abused child by an awful father who murdered the boy’s mother over money.

It was truly evil.

You don’t actually see the child being abused. You see everything happening and the child is invisible throughout. As I think about it, that could be even more symbolism right there.

I have good parents. My parents raised me right. I was in church every Sunday and my folks were kind to me. We had our differences and they made mistakes at times. All parents do.

Yet seeing something like this makes me think of what a blessing I have.

It also leaves me thinking not every child out there has that blessing. For some children, this wasn’t just a scene in a game. This was reality. For me, if a game helps open my eyes to something like that, that’s a powerful enough influence. People who say games can’t help us don’t know what they’re talking about. Stories are gripping. This scene gripped me with thinking about a poor innocent child being so horribly abused by his own father, the one who should have loved him and shown him how to be a man.

Scripture tells parents to raise their children in a way that doesn’t exasperate them. Children are to be seen as a gift. Israel was forbidden from child sacrifice entirely. It would not show your devotion to YHWH to sacrifice your children like it supposedly did to pagan gods. It would rather show how little you cared for the gift of child life he had given you.

That’s another reason abortion is so unthinkable. It treats children like they’re disposable. Children become an inconvenience. An abuser does that to his children that have been born. An abortion does it to the children who haven’t.

I can’t help but think of how Jesus said it would be better to have a millstone tied to you and to be thrown into the sea than to abuse a little one. In the game world, what happened to the child reverberated throughout time to the two decades later when the game takes place. The child is inflicting evil on others as an adult that is akin to what his father did to him, all the while thinking he is being a hero to those who are being abused. It’s hard to explain without playing the game. I don’t think I can. Just trust me on it.

If you had good parents, be thankful for them. You didn’t have to have them. You could have been born to parents who didn’t care for you. If you didn’t have them and you were like the abused child I saw, your parents don’t define you. You are valuable and capable of loving and being loved. Turn to Christ and rise above what happened to you. The more the abuse controls you, the more they win. It’s your life. Don’t let them dictate it. Jesus tells you who you are. No one else does.

To those who have abused children, repent. You have done a great evil and there is no excusing you, but there can be forgiving you. Turn to Jesus and seek to make things right. Seek to end abuse out there. No child ever deserves to be abused. Ever.

Think about these things.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Weapon of Wisdom

What is an underrated weapon? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Ecclesiastes 9 wraps up with this:

17 The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools. 18 Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.

Rulers were normally seen as wise people in the past, but here, the Teacher says it’s better to share wisdom in quiet than to broadcast it to fools. If you are a fool, you will not understand wisdom. In the age of the internet, there are plenty of people out there who think they know what they’re talking about, and they really don’t. As Twain said, it is better to have people think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war as well. This does not mean all warfare is wrong, but it does mean if the only way you have to establish your case is that you’re bigger than the other guy, you probably aren’t someone with a good case. Nowadays, the same could be said about a social media platform. If you think you have to cancel and boycott everything, it could be your case is weak. Not always, but it could be.

There are plenty of examples today also of one sinner destroying much good. As I write this, we are in the midst of seeing a bunch of memes about a cheating CEO caught at a Coldplay concert with another woman. The memes are funny, to be sure, but there are also good people who I am sure work at his company and now they are likely suffering something because of his actions.

Another key example for us today are failures in ministry, particularly those who fall into sexual sins. One of the most well-known examples sadly today is Ravi Zacharias. He was a hero of mine in the past and when I read about all the things that he had actually done, I thought I would be sick. I do know he wasn’t alone in this as there were others who had to know what was going on, but how much ministry was shot down because of what he did? While I do think his books still contain much that can be useful, I would never dare give them any more to a skeptical friend of mine. When the main guy at a prominent apologetics ministry does this kind of stuff, those in the field suffer.

There are two lessons that we can learn from things like this. The first is to watch out for people like this. It is easy to put forward a fron that everyone around you is convinced by. However, a far greater lesson for us to learn would be to make sure you are not the person like this. Some people think I’m extreme because I refuse to be in an elevator alone with a woman, or have one alone with me in my apartment, or ride in a car with one alone, unless we’re dating or they’re family. Why? One mistake can ruin you. Just one. I also know that when I think I am above temptation, I am much more likely to fall to it.

Guard yourselves. Live with wisdom.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Forgotten Heroes

Are they really gone but not forgotten? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We read this in Ecclesiastes 9:13-16:

13 I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me. 14 There was a little city with few men in it, and a great king came against it and besieged it, building great siegeworks against it. 15 But there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man. 16 But I say that wisdom is better than might, though the poor man’s wisdom is despised and his words are not heard.

When I wrote about this I said that:

In the penultimate under the sun, the Teacher praises wisdom that he sees. A small city gets besieged by a powerful king who built siege works against it. An ancient reader seeing this would think that a small city with few people will die, especially since the king can build siege works, meaning he has the resources to wait the people out and let them starve. No reason shows up in the text for why the king sieges the city, yet that does not change the reality. In this hopeless situation, there lived a man who had wisdom and by his wisdom, he saved the town, overturning the strength of even the king. The Teacher praises this, but eventually no one remembered that man and ignored his words. The Teacher still concludes that wisdom outranks strength. Perhaps going back to Moses, the Teacher has in mind someone like Joseph who saved Egypt by his wisdom, but then years later a Pharaoh rose up who did not know Joseph. No one reminded Pharaoh of the impact Joseph had. This matches with one sinner destroys much good since Pharaoh’s pride to not let the people go ruined Egypt.

Unfortunately, people do have a tendency to forget the heroes of the past. There are a lot of younger people today who will scream about the evils of Hitler, but I wonder how many of them know any of the names of the soldiers who fought against him? We have schools and hospitals and other buildings named after people that many of us do not know who they are.

The Teacher made sure to say that what he saw was a great example of wisdom. Indeed, but the tragedy in the story is as great as that wisdom was, the teacher does not know the name of the man. Wisdom is still greater than strength, but it does not give one the power to be immortal in the memories of men. Not only are heroes often forgotten, but we fail to learn from their wisdom.

Today, many people think they are for all intents and purposes the first generation on Earth. What happened before them is irrelevant. It is a great error. We need to remind ourselves who our heroes were in the past in politics, history, and even in our faith.

Our heroes can go. To forget them is our choice.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)