"The Divine Aristocracy"
An examination of Ecclesiastes 9 & 10 and how it applies to the contemporary church..
Download or email this sermon Where's the Discernment?
Continuing in verse 11:
"If the serpent bites before being charmed, there is no profit for the charmer."
Remember, the serpent beguiled the woman; Satan is a deceiver. I have a photo of myself in India attempting to charm a serpent. I played the flute, opening with a rendition of Blue Suede Shoes. The snake seemed to take exception to this and became cantankerous, so I switched to Amazing Grace in order to calm it down. A serpent can kill you; spiritual seduction is deadly. Where is discernment? If you don't know how to charm the serpent, it will bite you. In America, they really only have one very dangerous rattlesnake in the Southwest and then they have a cottonmouth. These are tame garden snakes in comparison with some I have seen in Australia and Africa or in Israel. America really doesn't have bad snakes.
These churches with an emphasis on experientialism talk very much about the gifts of the Spirit; so where is their gift of discernment? Why are they unable to charm the serpent? They are fooling around with a powerful enemy which has the potential to kill with its bite; snakes are known to burrow into houses, into the walls unnoticed. Spiritual seduction operates in the same manner. "If the serpent bites before being charmed, there is no profit for the charmer." It's too late to charm a snake after it has done the damage it is capable of; the flock must be protected ahead of time.
Ecclesiastes 10:12:
"Words from the mouth of a wise man are gracious, while the lips of a fool consume him. The beginning of his talking is folly, and the end of it is wicked madness."
Compare this with what we read in chapter 9:3:
"The hearts of the sons of men are filled with evil and insanity."
The end of his speech is “wicked madness”; more than simply madness, it is wicked madness. For a good example of this, watch our video of Rodney Howard-Browne and Kenneth Copeland. When Mr. Howard-Browne begins talking, his words are foolishness; he talks nonsense. Yet the end of it is exactly what the Scripture describes: wicked madness. The fruit of the Spirit is self-control, not the wicked madness that these people were led into by those men. It was actually demonic. You have to be out of your mind to do the things these people will do. The only unsaved people I have ever seen who will participate in the kinds of things so-called Christian people were doing in Pensacola, Toronto, and the imitators of such places, were Hindus practicing Kundalini yoga –“Kundalini” meaning “serpent spirit” - and headhunters in Indonesia. In England we have many believers from India, former Hindus and Sikhs who came to Jesus. When we showed the videos of Toronto and Pensacola behavior to the Indian pastors who'd come out of Hinduism they immediately identified it as Kundalini yoga, a practice they had been delivered out of by Jesus. “Wicked madness”. When they speak, it begins foolishly, with no doctrine given or exposition of God's Word; it inevitably ends in wicked madness.
Verse 14 of chapter 10:
"Yet the fool multiplies words. No man knows what will happen; who can tell what will come after him? The toil of a fool so wearies him that he does not even know how to go to the city!"
Do we realize what this means? What is the city? Jerusalem, or Heaven, drawing from Revelation 21. These people reach the point where they don't even know how to be saved. Jack Deere of the Vineyard movement could not explain the Gospel. In England, a poll was performed of 200 people who had taken Alpha courses; of these 200, four could explain the Gospel in New Testament terms – justification by faith, salvation by grace, etc. - 4 out of 200 knew what the Gospel was. They don't even know the way to the city. Today's Charismatic movement is composed largely of people who were never even saved, particularly since Wimber taught his “cheap grace” doctrine, because the Gospel is not even explained to people any more. They don't know the way to the city, and this is very frightening.
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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.