The Sovereignty of God in Ecclesiastes (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry,

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ML Abendroth here, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. I think that's what our slogan used to be.

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I don't know what our slogan is now. I have the information for Israel 2023, leaving

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February 21st, coming back May, excuse me, March 2nd. That'd be a long trip in May. And if you want to go, first come, first serve, you can email me for details, mike at nocompromiseradio .com.

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I'll send you the forms. You can send me the deposit, and off we're going to go.

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Prices and all that stuff, we'll post online soon. If you think $3 ,500, all expenses paid except for a few lunches, that's about what you should be factoring in if you're in the

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Boston group. Well, what are we talking about today? We're talking about practice. This is the

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Heidel blog, Heidel podcast. What do they call?

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I have it right here on my phone. What's Clark's called? The Heidelcast.

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Duh. There's TheoCast, there's the Heidelcast, there's a podcast.

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Remember iPods? What do you call earbuds? Why don't they call earpods?

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Earpods. Earpods. Dad, you sound old. I could just hear my kids, dad, you sound old.

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We have Bible verses here that we regularly talk about. I'm going to tell you a

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Bible verse and you tell me if you like the verse or not. Well, that's not fair because it's a

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Bible verse, you have to like it. You're thinking, is this a message moment? We know that for those who love

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God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.

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One of those verses that people love, rightfully so. Romans chapter eight, verse 28.

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Here's my question for today's show. What if this verse was not true?

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Oh, everything's going through your mind now that the Bible's not true, that God's not true, et cetera, et cetera. But just on a more,

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I don't know, coarser level, what if God wasn't sovereign?

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Or what if God was sovereign and didn't work these things for our good, but maybe for our bad or to punish us or something?

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What do we do if this verse isn't true? What do we do if it is true?

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Should our lives be different knowing God's sovereign? What if we act in a certain way that reveals that our theology doesn't let

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God be sovereign in our minds? Of course, of course He is sovereign. He doesn't let anything. Today on El Compromise Radio, if Romans 8 .28

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isn't true, for whatever reason, we're toast. We should be afraid. We should be full of worry.

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We should feel like we're done. But since it is true, what's the flip side of all that?

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How do we think? How do we feel? What should we act? In which way should we act?

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If God is in control, if God is reigning, if God is ruling, if God is

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Lord, if He's master, sovereign, how do we live? How do you live?

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Do we live as functional, we believe

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God's a deist? God's a deist functionally, we believe that? Or is He hands -on?

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Is He a, this is a bad word for most people, but for God it's a little bit different.

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Is God a micromanager? I am very glad that God is sovereign. I hope you are.

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I think if you listen to this show, you are. If the world is not governed by a sovereign hand, then what?

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God is sovereign, there is no such thing ultimately as chance or fate or kismet or serendipity or anything that might say something in the universe is free from the sovereign control at hand of God.

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God controls people, God controls events, God controls history, God controls climate, and I think it is free.

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I think it's wonderful. I think this is like a second blessing. Remember when you first got saved? That was your first major blessing, right?

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That's the blessing. And then when you learn how to speak in tongues, that's the second blessing. Shamana, shamana, pop, pop, pop.

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I can't believe that's what they told Kim to say. Can't you make up something different? Shamana, shamana,

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I mean, that's like a shaman and pop rocks put together, pop, pop, pop.

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Remember pop rocks? Maybe they should sponsor No Compromise Radio. I thought we were going to have a sponsor, and then they asked me what

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I would require for financial reimbursement, and I think they're wondering,

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I'm probably overcharged. Negotiating against myself,

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I have to overcharge to start. God is sovereign, and he is the most high.

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He is the Lord of heaven and the Lord of earth. That's a little merism, right?

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From the heavens to the earth, everything in between, including those two things. God is sovereign. Pink said,

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God is subject to none, influenced by none, absolutely independent. God does as he pleases, only as he pleases, and always as he pleases, and I might add, as often as he pleases.

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Isaiah 46, my counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. The second blessing, really, and I'm using that in kind of crass terms, is understanding the sovereignty of God over everything, including who goes to heaven and what's the weather like and everything in between.

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That is really, really an important thing to understand, that God does everything after the counsel of his own will, and Pink goes on to say that sovereignty means that God is

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God in fact, as well as in name. We love to talk about the sovereignty of God on No Compromise Radio.

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For quite some time, I've been focused on law gospel, third use of the law, first use of the law, assurance, the gospel tincture,

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God as father for believers, judge as unbelievers, how do we read the Bible, sanctifications, monergistic.

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That's what I've been trying to force feed you the last few years. That's why our listenership keeps going down the tubes.

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I could get higher ratings if I wanted. That's easy. You just talk about the

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Roy's Report, you talk about Beth Moore, you talk about Southern Baptist Convention delegates and presidencies, you talk about whatever, that kind of stuff.

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Important things, probably, but I want to talk about other things, undergirding things, theological things versus people who are either doing the right thing or not doing the right thing.

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Well, God is sovereign, and He is sovereign in fact, as well as in name.

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I concur with Pink. I echo his sentiments and remind you that God is sovereign and that you, along with me, of course, should walk by faith in this sovereign

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God, not by sight in a world that looks like it's out of control. This is going to help us because Jesus is the

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Lord of Lords and King of Kings. He's prophet, priest, and king, and knowing

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Jesus is sovereign, knowing more about Jesus that He not is just sovereign, but He loves us and gave

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His life for us. Knowing that it was not with precious things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect, 1

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Peter 1, verses 18 and 19. Knowing that, we can have great joy, and we can experience the one that the

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Father and the Son sent, that is, the Holy Spirit, and to experience the fruit of the

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Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love. What's the second one? Joy. Today on No Compromise Radio, we're going to talk a little bit more about ecclesiastes, the book

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Ecclesiastes, this wisdom literature, and what does it mean to believe in a sovereign

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God from the book of Ecclesiastes. Now, most of the time, people think of Ecclesiastes, and they just think, oh, it's a downer.

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It's depressing. It is, in fact, after you study it, it's going to make you think you're futile and vain.

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All is vanity. I mean, who wants to do that? The key to joy is Ecclesiastes. You got to be kidding me.

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One writer said this, set your shoulder joyously to the world's wheel. You may spare yourself some unhappiness if before you slip the book of Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.

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That's good. What do you mean? We can have joy understanding the book of Ecclesiastes?

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Did you know Ecclesiastes was read back in the day, the Jewish days, in the synagogue on the third day of the

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Feast of Tabernacles? This is the Harvest Festival reading.

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Do we have Harvest Festivals? Well, I think the closest Harvest Festival we have in America is

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Thanksgiving. We're thankful for what God has provided, and at Harvest Festivals, you would do the same thing.

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You would say we're thankful that God has provided these things, and we want to praise Him. Why would we read

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Ecclesiastes during Thanksgiving? Come on. Well, today on No Compromise Radio, we're going to understand that we can read

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Ecclesiastes and have great joy because God is sovereign, and that's what

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Ecclesiastes 3 talks about. The perspective from God's—the point of view from God, God's perspective, we can see with our eyes craziness, but we can see with eyes of faith that God's sovereign because He has told us that He is, and we can trust

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His word, and then the world can make sense. Then you can have joy. Then everything's not vexation and only vanity.

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Yes, life might be going by quickly. It might be like a vapor, but without the blinders on, now we can see things rightly that we can enjoy

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God's gifts because He gives us all good things. He's a great giving

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God, generous God, and that's, of course, His greatest gift, the Lord Jesus to us, for us, and then we can trust that He's sovereign, right?

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So, so far in Ecclesiastes, we've seen the problem, and the problem is you cannot find meaning in this life.

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The solution, you can find meaning during this lifetime in the one who gives you life, the triune

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God, and then now we move to chapter 3. Not only can you enjoy simple gifts, enjoy great gifts as if God were handing them to you because He is, but you can also have joy because God's sovereign.

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That's what we're talking about today in Ecclesiastes chapter 3.

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Now, of course, Ecclesiastes, it's a different kind of book. It's a wisdom book, and it's not like a bunch of laws that we would see in Leviticus or doctrinal treatise like we'd see in the book of Romans or end times literature like we would see in portions of Ezekiel or the book of Revelation.

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There are all kinds of, one writer said, quote, piles of parallelisms, synonymous, antithetic, synthetic inverted parallelisms, as well as many metaphors, similes, hyperboles, alliterations, assonances, and other wonderful word plays.

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There might even be onomatopoeia. There are proverbs, short narratives, parable -like endings.

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That's all found in the book of Ecclesiastes, a book that talks about vanity, wisdom, toil, fear, enjoyment, life under the sun.

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The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. And when you read the book of Ecclesiastes, you're going to say, hmm, that word vanity, that word futile, comes up a lot, and that word

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H -E -B -E -L is how we would see the transliterated Hebrew word. It can either mean perplexing, it can mean fruitless, vain, or it can mean fleeting.

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It just depends on the context which one it is. But of course, chapter one, verse three, says what does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

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This world has been affected by the fall, and life is very difficult, and then you die.

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Can there be any joy extracted from such a life? Can wisdom, pleasure, anything else help us?

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Well, Ecclesiastes two ends with, yes, there's nothing better for a person than he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.

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This also I saw is from the hand of God, for apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment?

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That is to say, with God, you can eat and you can have enjoyment, and you can live life to the fullest by recognizing that everything you have is a gift from the

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Lord God, the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All right, we're 15 minutes into the show, so let's see what this

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Starbucks coffee tastes like. Not too bad, not too shabby.

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No cream, not allowed to have dairy, three months, no dairy. That's no fun. You know how much

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I'd like to have a nice slice of cheese right now? Grilled cheese, cheesy fries, cheesy nachos,

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I'd even do some bad food if I could have some cheese. Well, I could, it just doesn't work out well for me.

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I just had lunch with a friend, one of the deacons here at the church, and I had a tuna kind of a raw tuna, seared tuna salad.

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That's what I get. It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. Hopefully, it didn't have a whole lot of mercury in it, but my days are numbered, are they not?

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I guess I could summarize chapter one and chapter two of Ecclesiastes this way before we get into the sovereignty section in chapter three.

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If you think about something else in theology, let's say assurance of salvation, I don't know if I feel assured and you chase assurance.

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It's hard to get assurance when you're chasing assurance, but if you're chasing or looking for or studying the

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Lord Jesus, then you naturally get assurance. So you look to the Lord and you want to worship him and honor him and trust him, then you get assurance as a

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Christian. Same thing with this. If you say to yourself, hmm, pleasure's fine.

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Sex, food, what the world offers, right?

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And I'm talking about not sinfully, but just in righteous context, marriage, in the sex context marriage.

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What do we... Is it okay to look for those things? If those are the end all, then you're not going to be fulfilled.

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But if you're, like with assurance, looking to the Lord Jesus, thinking about the triune God, wanting to study him, recognizing everything's a gift from his hand, that's fine.

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We're not against pleasure. We're not against what the list of things are there in Ecclesiastes, not against every one of them.

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I mean, we're against concubines and we're against slaves and that kind of stuff, but in terms of just pleasure in general, or wine or romance, no, we're not against those.

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But to focus on them as the end all, that's the problem. We come to the book of Ecclesiastes and we say there's this unified theme, and early on there's problems and solutions, and the problem of a pleasure -seeking world is it doesn't give meaning, so realize that God gives you everything.

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And then we come now to chapter three, reading through the lens of a triune

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God, we come to chapter three where there's a poem about God's sovereignty.

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I like to say God's sovereign, quoting maybe one of the confessions that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass.

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But here, we're going to have a great section on sovereignty with wisdom literature, even if you can see the indentation in your

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Bible that it's a poem in this wisdom literature.

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And I want you to embrace sovereignty. I like to do word studies, so I thought, well, what does embrace mean?

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And it means N, like in, and then brace, B -R -A -C, is where we get the word, think about the

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Latin word brachia, right, arm, and you embrace, you take it into your arms, you embrace, you enclose.

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I want you to do that with the sovereignty of God. I want you to experience that second blessing.

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And then when you see things like oppression in the world and war and poverty and sickness and there's disappointments in your own life and frustration in your own family, you can say to yourself,

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I don't know how to solve these problems, but the Lord knows about them and is doing something about it. Now that is freeing.

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That is very practical. That will affect your life. When Luke was born sick and we didn't know if he was gonna make it, to put my arms around a doctrine was the

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Lord is sovereign. That's what you have to think about. And it's harder in our day to think about the sovereignty of God, especially when we think about self -rule and what people want and manifest destiny type of stuff.

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God has a plan and it covers everything. And dear listeners, it covers you.

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It covers our enemies. It covers our government. God is sovereign.

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Pink said from every pulpit in the land, it needs to be thundered forth that God still lives, that God still observes and God still reigns.

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You're going to see in this book, the word Elohim occur regularly. And many times, even in this chapter, chapter three, the name for God that talks about his sovereign creation, how great he is, how sovereign he is, how transcendent he is, how he is to be not just enjoyed, but also worshiped and feared.

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The sovereignty of God, the triune God, Elohim, the

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Father, Elohim, the Son, Elohim, the Spirit. God is sovereign.

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Well, with some parallel structure here, with some kind of rhythmical kind of inhaling, exhaling, we have

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Ecclesiastes 3 .1. The overview, verse one, everything, there's a season and a time for every matter under heaven.

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You think we are the master of our own destiny, captain of our own ship. We can do almost anything.

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We can put people on the moon. God is sovereign though. And here we have, there's a season, a time for everything under heaven.

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Everything is under heaven's control. There is no fate. There is no chance.

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They, meaning all of us, ought not to think we're God, ought not to think that we can control everything.

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We have to be thinking that God is controlling his divine purposes.

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How about this for a good little fact? Before you were born, he was in control of everything. While you're alive, he's in control of everything.

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And when you're dead, he's in control of everything. Now the word that's the popular one here in chapter three is time.

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It's used many times. I think maybe 30 times the

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English word time is used based on your particular translation, your

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English translation. Fourteen pairs of opposites.

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28 times you'll see the word times in these next verses. Plus the times, we've already seen the word time in the first two times.

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It was used in the verse one before the other times in the 28 times in the 14 pairs of times. Double seven, idea of completeness, 14 lines, could be.

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A lot of polar opposites here. Polar opposites, if you say everything under heaven and earth, that's polar opposites meaning everything in between.

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What kind of device, literary device is that? What's it called? It's called a merism. That's good, merism.

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Not like a horse's merism, but M -E -R. We know that life is lived under the sun and God is sovereign over everything and now he starts giving these, time to be born, time to die.

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Do you know God's sovereign over when you were born and when you're going to die? This pretty much encompasses everything from beginning to end,

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God's sovereign. He was sovereign on your birthday, sovereign on your funeral.

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Do you have control of your own birth? Do you have control of your own death? I'm not talking about suicide,

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I'm talking about God knows and God will make it happen. I mean, what's the option?

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God's surprised, something got thrown in there. Well, time's up today, but we're going to get straight into this for the next show.

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God is sovereign over everything in your life, aren't you glad? Why don't you say, Lord, thank you for being sovereign. Lord, thank you for being in control of my boss, my spouse, the world, the government.

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Thank you. You are to be praised. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.