The Sovereignty of God in Ecclesiastes (Part 2)

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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, a ministry. My name is

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Mike Abendroth. I have an announcement to make today. God is sovereign, and you are not.

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God is sovereign, and I'm not. Can you imagine if we had to have that weight on our shoulders? Wow. That would be amazing.

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He, God, is king. Well, I'm happy for that. So are you.

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Jesus, prophet, priest, and king. And today, we're still in the book of Ecclesiastes, the preacher who preaches to the church, the ecclesiological body, ecclesiology,

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Ecclesiastes. We have the preacher, and what's he preaching about? He's preaching about godly wisdom, and in chapter three, he's talking about sovereignty.

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Now we, at least for me, I think of sovereignty as whatsoever comes to pass, using more technical theological definitions.

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And the writer here, let's say it's Solomon. I hope it's Solomon, but it doesn't have to be Solomon. It's an anonymous book.

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He's related to David. He's a king. Okay. He's got a lot of riches. Well, pretty wise.

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Sounds like Solomon to me, but whatever. Some people argue about it. You probably used to argue about it, and that's not what

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I argue about anymore. I argue about other things. By the way, Israel is a go. You can write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com,

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to get the list of things that you need to do and send in your deposit, $500, so you can get a spot on the bus.

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Maybe we need two buses. I don't know. Think $3 ,500 from Boston, and if you want to come from someplace else, that's fine.

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We'll just have to add a little bit to get you up here. I think if you want to come up a night early,

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I could probably find you a place to stay. No promises, but I think I can.

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Solomon, in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, talks about sovereignty, so that you can enjoy life, because life is really difficult.

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It's frustrating. It's full of all kinds of things that are directly related to the original sin, the

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Adam's fall. This world, Romans 8, it groans. There's futility in this world.

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There's sin. There's death. There's unfulfilled promises. There's sickness.

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All kinds of bad stuff happen on this earth. Can you have any joy? Well, if you see things from the perspective of God, whatever

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I have that's good, God gives me. That's an important one. That's chapter 2, and then now chapter 3, if you see

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God as sovereign, if you embrace a sovereignty, it's going to help you a lot, because A, it's true, B, it's revealed to be true, and C, it'll help you make sense of things, even if you can't figure it out, even if you don't know why something's happening, who is in charge?

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So it's not the why, but it's the who. And the writer, I don't know why I keep thinking it's Paul, it's not Paul, obviously.

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The writer says, in Ecclesiastes 3, 1, for everything there's a season and a time for every matter under heaven.

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Under God's heaven, there's time for everything, and now he begins to do these 14 pairs of things using the word time.

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There's a time to be born and a time to die. That's where we ended last time. God is sovereign over your birthday and on your day of your death.

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Then right after that, of course, the funeral. Maybe you have a funeral on the same day, then it would be birthday, funeral. He's even sovereign over which day your funeral's going to be too.

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If you look at the world and you think, luck, accident, bad,

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Solomon, the writer, is going to say divine appointments. The king of the universe could have decided that you were never to be born, or that you would be born in any country at any time to any parents that pleased him.

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He chose your exact parents, the very strands of your DNA, the day of your birth, the day and cause of your death, the color of your eyes, hair, skin, your sex, and everything about you.

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There's nothing about you that was not sovereignly decided upon by the triune God, nothing. That's exciting.

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That's amazing. We want to revel in that. We don't want to be confused or anxious about that.

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No, that should give us hearts of joy. That should give us hearts of happiness and gladness.

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Job 14, since his days are determined, the number of his months is with you and his limits you have set so that he cannot pass.

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We're going to live as long as God wants us to live. Psalm 31, my times are in your hand, deliver me from the hand of my enemies and from those who persecute me.

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Psalm 139, you're all familiar with that. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance, and in your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.

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While I encourage exercise for health reasons, stress relief, stress release, and other factors no amount of energy, exercise, surgery, vitamins, or anything else will prevent you from dying one day later than you're supposed to die.

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Of course, physical exercise profits a little, but zinc, echinacea, vitamin

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C will not decelerate the timing of your funeral. Jesus said to John, speaking of John's ordained death, he knew the day because God ordains your life and your death.

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You should have peace, right? It shouldn't make you anxious. You cannot die if 1 ,000 terrorists are pursuing you, or if you're supposed to die, you could have 1 ,000

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SWAT team members protecting you. There are boundaries in this world because God's sovereign.

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He goes to the next one in verse 2, a time to plant, a time to pluck up what is planted. What goes for our lives goes for plants as well.

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Are they underneath the sovereign umbrella of God and his care and his provision?

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Seasons of planting, seasons of harvest. Is there a right time to plant? Yes. That's in the spring.

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Is there a right time to pluck up what's planted? Yeah. It's harvest time. Of course, the Jewish people that received this would understand agricultural issues.

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There's a time to kill and a time to heal. The word murder isn't used here.

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The word kill is. This is capital punishment kind of language, or in a battle, an army fighting, they kill.

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This is not murder. This is a time to kill. This could be you kill somebody under the death penalty in whatever state might allow that.

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God is sovereign. There's execution of justice. Their animals died, right?

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Temple rituals for sacrificial systems. Matter of fact, God would order the killing of some of Israel's enemies, kill them all, right?

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The cancer that was invading Israel. Of course, God has ordained the perfect sacrifice of his only son, the

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Lord Jesus. There's a time for this. There's a time for capital punishment. There's a time for just war, and there's a time to heal things up.

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There's a time to break down and a time to build up. There's a time that you can break down a wall, right?

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I think it's a literal wall here, but you could talk about metaphorically a relationship wall that needs to be torn down, and a time to build up.

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Sometimes you've got to take down a house, and sometimes you've got to rebuild a house. Sometimes you've got to tear down things, maybe a temple that's full of idols, and then you sometimes need to build up a real temple, or a real synagogue type of temporal temple to worship

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Yahweh. There was a time that our

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Lord Jesus even said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

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There's a time to weep, verse four. There's a time to laugh. Is it appropriate to cry?

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Is it appropriate to laugh? I always hate it when people would say, well, the Bible never says anything about Jesus laughing, okay?

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And your point is what? What's the point? Well, Jesus is truly man, right?

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He assumed human nature. He's perfectly man. We laugh. God has made us as people that laugh.

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Oh, there can be a derisive laugh, a sinful laugh, right? God's not going to do this, kind of the laugh of Sarah. You name your kid

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Isaac, he'd sock laughter. But there's a good laugh. There's a healthy laugh. Jesus laughed.

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Of course Jesus laughed. I laugh at you saying Jesus isn't laughed, it never laughed.

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There's going to be a time of laughter, too, of the Lord Jesus. That's Psalm 2. He laughs at them. He scoffs at them.

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All right. What else? There's a time to mourn and a time to dance. Is there a time to mourn?

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You lose a loved one, somebody that you love's going through a trial or has been hurt in some way, shape, or form, well, you mourn.

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Is there a time to dance? Here, the Ark of the Covenant's retrieved and David dances, of course.

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There's a time to dance for me. The time to dance is Thursday nights at 7 p .m. with my wife, ballroom dancing.

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The last three weeks on Thursday nights, we've been doing the rumba. Not just any kind of rumba, this is the silver edition of rumba, that means some special moves.

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We have a good teacher, his name's Jim, and it's funny because he'll say then to the class in the middle of the instruction, now, don't act like you have no hips, don't look like a robot, you know, and then he'll critique us.

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And then I always say, well, why are you looking at me when you say that? I don't,

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I can't do the hips like the Latin stuff, I don't have the hips to do it. I mean, I do, I just don't understand how to do that toe heel thing that makes your hips move.

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And as a pastor, you know, I think it'd probably be inappropriate for me to do a certain kind of hip. But my wife and I, we have fun.

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If you, I mean, my kids are out of the house now, right, so what do we do? Kim's picked up some golf lessons, we have dance lessons, lots of church stuff going on now.

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It's easier for us to have people from the church over all the time. In the old days, I had to guard my family because you could just have church people over every night.

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Well, don't have to do that now, so we can have church people over a lot more than we had in the past.

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Well, what does this have to do with anything? I have no idea. What's my coffee taste like? There's a time to mourn, there's a time to dance.

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This is an interesting one, verse five, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.

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I mean, they've got some really weird things, weird, like physical intimacy things here.

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I don't think it has anything to do with that. It's just kind of a weird, weird view. What do you think this is all about?

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Casting stones? Well, scorched earth policies, if you're going to try to destroy some place because you're an invader and you don't want people to profit anymore, you do that.

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And then how do you destroy a farmer's field? Well, back in those days, you'd throw rocks on it, stones, because it was hard to cultivate a field.

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They'd ruin it in a war, on purpose. So there's a time for that and there's a time to gather stones.

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When you gather stones, you could be building a wall, a fortress around a city, a home.

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This is pretty simple. You want to make a field unproductive, you just throw a bunch of rocks in there.

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This is right from 2 Kings 3. This is a light thing in the sight of the Lord. He will also give the

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Moabites into your hand and you shall attack every fortified city and every choice city and shall fell every good tree and stop up all the springs of water and ruin every good piece of land with stones.

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When they overthrew the cities and on every good piece of land, every man threw a stone until it was covered.

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They stopped up every spring of water and felled all good trees till only its stones were left and the slingers surrounded and attacked it.

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I have not had any stones thrown at me since I was a kid, like rock fights and stuff, mud fights, mud ball.

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There's a lot of mud balls around construction sites. We'd have a mud ball fight, you know, like rock.

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You throw rocks at people, man, how do people not get as hurt as they did? One tour guide said about Israel that God gave stones to an angel and told him to distribute them equally around the world, but he tripped and fell in Israel.

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A lot of rocks, a lot of rocks. Even here in New England, you see all kinds of rock fences, so many rock fences.

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And some have found that these rock fences are, we call them stone walls. There's 252 ,000 miles of stone walls, enough to build all the pyramids of Egypt 100 times over.

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Hmm. That's amazing. What happens? Well, we have frost heaves here and the frost thaw cycles of glaciers that were here 42 billion years ago.

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Anyway, we have a lot of freezing and then up comes in the spring, more rocks.

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What do you do with the rocks? Well, you got to get rid of these rocks so you can farm.

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And so one writer said, when life gives you stones, build a wall. So anyway, there's my little deviation for no co -radio today.

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Don't forget about the Israel trip. It's coming up pretty soon. I'm supposed to be filming some American gospel television shows on the doctrine of sanctification coming up soon.

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I don't know if that's going to happen or not. I need to prepare. The law gospel was fine.

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I was sick. I could have prepared better. At least it was okay.

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You know, God's word does its work, even though the messenger might not be in top form.

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Verse five, there's a time to embrace and time to refrain from embracing. There's a time to be with your wife.

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There's a time to have loving care for one another. There's a time for friends. What do they do in the

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Middle East and even in countries now, kiss each other on the cheeks? I can never remember if it's the one kiss, two kiss.

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Is that Italian or a Greek? One kiss, two kiss, three kiss. Which one's that?

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Yeah, just do the air kiss on the cheeks until they stop. Then I know

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I'm done. On your wedding night, is there a time to embrace? Yes. One guy said, there's a time to refrain from embracing if somebody that you know has leprosy.

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That would be true. Time to seek and a time to lose, right?

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We have to gain possessions by seeking them and we are active in that and we're passive in losing things.

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One writer said, as I write this, the volatility of the world's stock and oil prices gives the interpretation a particular relevance and reminds us of how little we can do about such things.

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That was written probably 20 years ago. What about now underneath the current administration that we have?

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Joe Biden. That's interesting. Time to keep and there's a time to cast away, right?

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You got to save up your grain like Joseph told people because a famine's coming and there's time to cast away.

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The one that I read this week that was the most, that epitomized casting away the most, throwing

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Joe overboard. Evil. There's a time to tear, verse seven, and a time to sew.

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When you are grieving, you tear your robe back in those days. When Job's children died, he tore his robe.

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And there's a time to sew, right? You can sew clothes to make clothes or after you've ripped your clothes, grieving, and now you're over the grieving process, you sew up those clothes, right?

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When you are going through trouble, you rip your garments. There's a time of repentance, time of grief, time of bereavement.

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We are to grieve, yes, but we don't grieve like we're unbelievers. We grieve like there's a resurrection, like the

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Lord Jesus is in fact coming back. The morning's over, M -O -U -R -N -I -N -G, and now we sew things up.

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There's a time to be silent, a time to speak. The time to speak is certainly on the radio. Radio is no good if you're silent.

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Let's redeem that. Jesus before the Sanhedrin, quiet, but there are other times to talk.

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Jesus did respond to Pilate, right, you say. Time to speak,

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Proverbs 25, a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

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There's a time to love, there's a time to hate, right?

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There's righteous anger, time to love. There's time for war, time for peace, and it's interesting, it ends with this, with this shalom.

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There's a time for war and there's a time for a cessation of that hostility, but could it even mean a little bit more?

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There's a time for war and there's a time for just wholeness of life in every area. Probably time for war and time for peace, peace from war, that's probably the right way to look at this.

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Time for war, here goes the walls in Jericho tumbling down. Time for peace, there is ultimately, of course, the barrier between us and God has been torn down by the

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Lord Jesus himself. Even the barrier between Jews and Gentiles taken down, there's one people of God.

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Most people, when they come to this passage, they think, oh, this is the 1965 hippie song by the

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Byrds, B -Y -R -D -S. Now it is from Ecclesiastes 3, 1 to 8, but it's not really about that because it's an anti -war song.

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It's an anti -Vietnam song, and so they add the phrase, I swear it's not too late.

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So when Solomon says a time for war and a time for peace, they add, I swear it's not too late.

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But I think this does contain some of the oldest lyrics in any popular song, going back to this day.

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Chapter 3, verse 1, remember it started off, for everything there's a season and a time for every matter under heaven.

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I don't want you to think that the world is just random. One person called it celestial dice that's just thrown.

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No, we take every day from God's good hand, every good gift from God's good hand, whether we eat or drink or we have relatives, we have a spouse, we have children, everything good we have is from the

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Lord. Even trials are from his good hand. And we say to ourself, what gain has the worker from his toil, verse 9?

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What do we do with that? There's the same, that's the same rhetorical question back in chapter 1, what do we gain?

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Why should I work hard? Why should I get married? Why should we have children?

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I've seen, verse 10, the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He's made everything beautiful in its time.

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Also he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

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He's made everything beautiful in its time. He's made everything, Enneas says, appropriate in its time.

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And you begin to see how wonderfully God has ordained everything and his plan covers it all.

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And his providential working we wouldn't know about unless God told us.

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And looking backwardly, if you look backwards, you can see, oh yeah,

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I can see what God's doing now. When we look into the future, we could never understand. Michael Eaton says,

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God's disposal of all events is in their times and it is beautiful.

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And we say to ourself, everything, right? It's in the first sentence, first part of the sentence, so it's emphatic.

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Everything God makes, it's appropriate, it's beautiful, it's fair, it's fitting.

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The beauty of God's sovereignty and his order. We love

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God's mercy, yes. We love God's grace, yes. We love God's love. God is love.

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God is sovereign as well. Life is hard, yet we know God's purposes are moving forward.

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And it says something interesting there, verse 11, he's put eternity in our hearts. The striving for the eternal, the striving for significance, the striving for meaning to life.

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Just look at the tombs of the Egyptians, i .e.

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the pyramids. What do you have to do to make some of those things? Why would you put so much effort into it?

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It's for a tomb, for to put a dead person, because they're thinking about the afterlife. Eternity in their hearts.

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Wanting to know this deep down determination to understand eternity, the future.

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Is there more to life than this? Augustine said, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you.

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God, you made us for yourself and until we are yours by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, there's no other peace.

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Some people even think this is kind of a compulsive thing, this desire for eternity and for purpose.

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Anyway, my name is Mike Gabendroth and it's just good to sit here and talk about the sovereignty of God. God's sovereign over everything.

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Your children, your children's salvation, your spouse, your spouse's salvation, the government that we have.

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I know you might need more money because of inflation, everything else, God knows. God cares. God knows.

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And you can enjoy today. So happy day, joyful day, the fruit of the Spirit is love.

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What's the second one? Joy. May you be joyous today. May I even tell you by a command, rejoice in the

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Lord always and again I say, rejoice. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Gabendroth 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 10 .15 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.