"The Divine Aristocracy"
An examination of Ecclesiastes 9 & 10 and how it applies to the contemporary church..
Download or email this sermon There Is No Wisdom
Continuing in verse 7 of Ecclesiastes 10:
"I have seen slaves riding on horses,"
The word “slaves” here in Hebrew is “avedim”, the same word used for the Hebrews in Egypt. Slaves are figures of unsaved people; their lives are spent making bricks for Pharaoh. The New Testament tells us that a man is enslaved by that which overcomes him. Unsaved people are enslaved to their sin, but we who know the Lord and follow Him have been set free and delivered from Egypt.
". . . and princes walking like slaves on the ground."
Today we see people who are enslaved to their passions and desires, riding in limousines, driving BMW's, and generally living the high life while the real aristocracy tries to get by with Fords. The aristocrat lives like a peasant, the peasant lives like a noble, and God says that this is an evil under the sun.
Verse 8:
"He who digs a pit may fall into it, and a serpent may bite him who breaks through a wall. He who quarries stones may be hurt by them, and he who splits logs may be endangered by them. If the axe is dull and he does not sharpen its edge, he must exert more strength. Wisdom has the advantage of giving success."
In 1 Peter 2:5 we see that the house we build is the church and we are the living stones of the Temple. We explain in our Typology of the Temple teaching how this works: we are the stones of the Temple; its components are figures of different Christians.
When you chopped logs in the ancient world you used an axe; but if the blade was dull, it took more energy and force to chop the logs – it would not cut smoothly or easily and you would also have projectiles flying in your face as it splintered. Remember the Old Testament story of how the axe-head floated: he had the axe handle, but because it had no blade, or in other words because there was no wisdom, it was ineffective and even unusable.
Notice how many churches today go from one program to the next, trying to build something. Yet what is built is shabby: the stones are not evenly cut, and nothing fits together properly. You are better off in a church of 100 people that is solid and well-built than in one of these huge things that fall to bits at a breath of wind. For example, what happened to the church in Pensacola, Florida that was headquarters of the famous so-called revival? It split. What's left of Toronto, where a similar false revival was held? Practically nothing. The one in England was Sunderland; it is now a small group meeting in a hotel. They crumble, because the stones were never fitted together. There was much energy, exertion and hype put into these movements, but they came to nothing. Why? Because the head of the axe is dull – there is no wisdom.
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Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.