16 July, 2000

Getting Away With It

Ecclesiastes 8:11

A number of years ago, there was this comedian called Dave Gardner, and he told a story about a man that was on an airplane flight.
It was one of the smaller commuter airplanes, and they were trying to get through this line of thunderstorms, and things weren't going real well.
There was lightning flashing outside the window, and the airplane was beating and banging and getting bounced around every which way, and this businessman was getting really scared.
The sweat is rolling down his face, and he's so scared he's about to get sick, so he does something he hasn't done in a number of years, he starts to pray.
And he says; "Oh God, if only you'll get me off this airplane alive, I'll give you half of everything I own."
Well, just a minute or two later, the airplane breaks out through the back side of this line of weather, the air is just as smooth as silk, and the flight lands without any trouble at all.
The businessman gets his briefcase, and gets off the airplane, and he's just starting to go out through the terminal, when this man stops him.
"Excuse me sir, but I'm a preacher: didn't I hear you praying back on that airplane?"
The businessman stops, and looks at the preacher, and says; "Why yes, that was me."
So then the preacher says; "I believe I heard you say that if God would get you off that airplane alive, that you'd give Him half of everything you own; and I was just wondering if you be interested in starting that process right away?"
The businessman shook his head and said; "No, I won't be doing that now, I made God a better deal. I told Him if I ever got back on another airplane, He could have it all!"

Today I want to talk about people that trifle with God. People that think they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
Why can some people seem to mock God and get away with it? Why do the righteous suffer, and the evil prosper? Why don't we see the justice of God more often in our daily lives?

Probably everybody that knows anything at all about Bible history knows of how Pharaoh told Moses that he would let the people go free, and then he would change his mind and not follow through on his word.
As long as the judgement of God was on him, he was fearful and humble, but by the next day, his arrogance and disdain toward God had returned.
Humble under judgement, but arrogant and proud as soon as the judgement seemed to be gone.
In our culture, we would compare that to death bed conversions, or jail house conversions.
Once the sick man gets back up from his supposed death bed, or the criminal gets released from prison, they forget their promises of repentance, and go back to their old ways.

King Solomon saw the same thing during the course of his life. If you have your Bibles with you today, and I hope you do, turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 8, and verse 11.

Two things I want us to cover today: first, I want to do a quick review of how and why Ecclesiastes is a book that has to be taken in context, because if you don't;- you come away with a very flawed understanding.
Second, someone asked me an excellent question this week: if Jesus has already won the victory, and Satan is already a defeated foe, why are we Christians always getting so beat up and hassled? In a broader sense, why do the evil prosper, and the good suffer?
Why do we often see evil people keep getting away with their evil, what does that say about the justice and judgement of God?

We spent some time in Ecclesiastes last week, and brought out that this is a book that has to be taken in context.
Solomon wrote this book toward the end of a long life that started out well, but then turned into a long downhill slide.
God made Solomon the wisest man that has ever lived, but Solomon corrupted his wisdom by his love for foreign and pagan women.
God had told His people not to take wives of the nations that were around them, because they would turn the hearts of the people to following strange gods, and that was exactly what happened to Solomon.
I believe that when Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, he was a discouraged and frustrated old man, a backslidden believer that no longer could discern the mind of God the way he could when he was younger.
Solomon constantly sees life on earth as a vanity; something that is useless, unfulfilling, disappointing, frustrating.
He is unable to see God's purposes for mankind in any of the things that happen to people. It all seems pointless to him. He is gloomy and cynical. Ecclesiastes is a melancholy book.

It is also a book that has a lot of half-truths in it. Solomon has applied human wisdom without divine input from the Holy Spirit, and he comes up with certain things that are just plain wrong.
Why do we know it's wrong? Because it's contradicted by other Scripture in other places.
When you read Ecclesiastes, think about the context: it is a book that God has given us to show us what happens when we get away from Him.

Bearing that in mind: Chapter 8:11; " Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.
Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God, which fear before him:
But it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow; because he feareth not before God.
There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity.
Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun."

This passage illustrates the contradictions going on in Solomon's mind: verses 11, 12 & 13 are true, Godly wisdom, and verses 14 and especially 15 are human wisdom.
Verse 11 would be a good description of Pharaoh, and of any number of other people in our criminal justice system. Verse 11 is always true at all times.
Verses 12 & 13 may not always appear to be true "under the sun"; which is a phrase Solomon uses a lot in this book, but they are finally true when we all stand before God.

But then look at verses 14 & 15: Solomon cannot understand the workings of the plans and counsels of God in the affairs of men, and he gives up on it, he says it is all just a vanity; a pointless frustration, a useless waste of a life.
It's true, there a lot of things in life that are hard to understand. Some times the good guys lose and the bad guys win. Life isn't always fair or just. And we have trouble understanding that.
But the solution is not found in verse 15, which is the best that Solomon's human wisdom can come up with.
"Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun."
"Don't worry; be happy." Here we have human wisdom, looking at man "under the sun", the natural man, without God's revelation, and this is the best that human wisdom can come up with. It's not very helpful, is it?

This is why we have to keep Solomon in mind as an object lesson to us when we read Ecclesiastes.
If we rebel against God's Word, if we disobey Him, we will probably end up in our senior years just as lacking in spiritual discernment, just as frustrated and melancholy as he was.

That takes care of the first thing I wanted to cover; now we need to try and figure out a harder question: why the delay of the judgement of God against evil?
Verse 11; "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil."
We see this all around us all the time, don't we? Murderers go to trial, get condemned to be executed, and still manage to spend twenty years or more in prison before the sentence is carried out.
Sometimes we get annoyed at the criminal justice system, and we wonder why it takes so long. We wonder what's wrong.
Nothing's wrong. All that delay is a normal thing, and probably a good thing, because in the spiritual realm, that is the way that God does things.

Psalm 103:8 tells us; "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy."

Psalm 145:8 says; "The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy."

There is a good reason that God acts this way toward us; have you ever thought about how all our unsaved lives we are on probation?
If God always punished us immediately as soon as we sinned, imagine what kind of life that would be like.
I'm not sure how such a thing would work, but just for the sake of trying to understand it, lets say that every time we sinned, God did something to make us uncomfortable, or cause us some physical problem.
Imagine going through each day and every wrong thought, or word, or deed, we get hit with a headache, upset stomach, leg cramps or whatever.
We would grow up with this mental image of God as some kind of cosmic bully, and the only way we could think of Him would be in terms of fear and hatred.
I mean, if all He does -from our point of view- is pick on us and beat us up, and hurt our families, and hurt our kids and our friends, we would probably never be able to get past that mental image of "the mean bully" to learn anything else about Him, right?

If we did learn to obey God, would we obey Him out of love, or out of fear? Fear. And that is not the obedience that God desires of us.
God does not desire us to come to Him out of fear, but out of love.

Have you ever been around a dog that has been trained through fear?
I don't know about you, but when I am around a dog that obeys it's master because of fear, I get a bad, creepy feeling.
Sometimes people get in those kind of situations; where one person attempts to manipulate the relationship by causing the other person pain. We call that abuse, and we correctly believe that it's immoral.
Something is all wrong. And if that is true of human relationships, how much more wrong and perverse to think that God would want to base His relationship to us, and ours to Him, on the basis of fear.
God does not want our relationship with Him to be based on fear. He wants a good, healthy relationship based on love, and us understanding who He really is: a God of love and mercy.

In Romans 2:4 Paul asks the question, and I'm going to paraphrase it here; "Do you despise the riches of God's goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; do you not know that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?

Instead of God raising a hand to smack us, which He could; He extends a hand of blessing.
God moves around us, He works around us, wooing us and winning us to Himself.
He does not ignore our sin, He doesn't pretend that we don't sin, that we are not sinners, but He is patient, He still loves us and blesses us.
He gives us the vineyard, even if we don't give Him any of the fruit out of it.
He still send us His messengers, even when we don't want to hear them, we stone them, and we run them off.
God waits. He waits for years and years, while we go on in our rebellion, in our defiance, in our sins, and He doesn't give up on us.
The patience of God sometimes seems almost endless, if we look back and see how long God waited for some of us to finally repent and receive Jesus Christ for our atonement for sin, it seems hard to imagine that God was willing to wait so long.

Question; just because God waits patiently, even when we are slow to respond, does that mean that everything is cool?
Does that mean that it really doesn't matter if we are slow to come around?

Let's read the verse again; "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily..." Hmmm.
Notice that there is already a sentence. Because the trial goes on every day. And the trial has a sentence. And it is a sentence against an evil work.

In John 3:18 we are told; "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
There is only one means of salvation; belief-saving faith- in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The person who believes and receives Him as Savior is not condemned. Read it again:
"He that believes on Him is not condemned." That's what it says. End of probation; deliverance from condemnation.
He that believes on Him is not condemned. But the one who does not believe is condemned already, because they have not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God.
The sentence has been passed, but the execution of the sentence has been delayed for a while. The sinner still has opportunity to repent.

God has knowledge of everything that happens on the earth. When we see some awful, evil thing happen, and no thunderbolt falls from the sky and destroys the evil doer, it's not because God is like the referee at some cosmic professional wrestling match, and he was looking the wrong way and missed seeing it.

Just because God chooses not to move His arm, does not mean that His eye does not see.

God sits silently and beholds the evil and the good; just because He is silent does not mean He is indifferent.

The sentence has been pronounced, but the execution of the sentence has been delayed. During the delay, sometimes evil triumphs; sometimes good suffers.
But sometimes during those delays, people's hearts get changed. Sinners get converted.
The love and patience of God has accomplished it's purpose, and sometimes something happens that would never have happened if the sentence for sin had been carried out at once.
But there are no guarantees. Sometimes something happens in the hearts of sinners, and sometimes not.
Sometimes people take advantage of God's patience. Sometimes people abuse God's longsuffering of them.
Sometimes we procrastinate. We believe the things we read about God, and we believe that He is righteous, and holy, and that He will judge sin.
We believe that we really do need to get right with God, we need to go to Jesus Christ with our load of sin and guilt, and give it to Him, and receive Him as our righteousness.
But meanwhile, nothing much is happening. Life goes on pretty well, things are still working OK, life has it's ups and downs, everything's cool.

We need to take another look at Romans 2:4. "Despising the riches of His goodness and forbearance and long-suffering."
Why is God patient? The whole reason that God is so rich in patience is so that His goodness can lead us to repentance.
But what if we despise His goodness? What does that mean?

When we despise something, we refuse it, we reject it, it is a worthless, useless thing to us.
Is there someone here today that is despising the riches, the abundance, the bounty of God's goodness and forbearance toward us?
What an awful situation to be in. Here we are totally eaten up with sin, desperately needing someone to come and clean us up, bind our wounds, heal us, rescue us from corruption, and when God comes and offers to do that for us; we spit at it.
That is not real smart. The goodness of God truly does lead us to repentance, but strangely, some people never seem to be touched by it.

This is one place where Solomon's wisdom is right on the money. Because God has been patient with them for a long time, they get set in their ways, and think that they can go on just like they are without worrying about it.
In spite of the loving patience of God; "the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil."
Is there any better definition of rebellion than that? "The heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil." That's sin. Big time.

A minute ago I read John 3:18, let me read it again along with the verse that follows it:
"He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."
Will God delay for ever? Is His patience infinite? His patience is probably infinite, but He also knows the end from the beginning, and our allotted times are not infinite.
There is a sentence against an evil work, and even though it may not always be executed speedily, it's execution is always inevitable.
It is impossible that the sentence should not be executed.

If Jesus Christ was judged for the sins of those that trusted in Him for salvation, then could there be any possible escape for those who refuse to trust Him?
If God judged His Son on the cross for the sins of those who trusted Him, will He not also most certainly judge those that despise His mercy?

None of us knows the time or the counsels of God, but when God has done all that He can do, when He sees that the situation is beyond redemption, when the heart is fixed in it's sin, or even for any number of other reasons, the sentence is carried out.
God kept back the destroying angels from Sodom and Gomorrah for a time, but then they went forth at last.
Surely none of them knew it, but there came a time when the iniquity of the Amorites was full, and God determined to destroy them from the earth.
How long did Noah build the ark? How many years passed while men probably mocked Noah and his preaching of the coming judgement of God?
But finally the day came when the door was shut, and the floods came and destroyed them all.
For generations the Lord desired to gather Jerusalem to Himself, just as a hen gathers it chicks under it's wings, but they would not, and the Romans finally destroyed the nation.

Earlier I paraphrased read Romans 2:4, let me do it again along with the verse that follows it; "Do you despise the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth you to repentance?
But after your hard and impenitent heart you treasure up unto yourself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God."
Treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath. When we despise the goodness of God to deliver us from the sentence of judgement that already awaits us, what is it that we are storing up for ourselves?

Wrath. Stored up, laid up like treasure for the day of wrath. What are we hoarding away?

Add it up: every evil we have ever said and done and thought has already been sentenced; the punishment is delayed for our sins because of the death of Christ.
God is calling to us to be reconciled to Him through Christ, and meanwhile He is holding back the sentence that we daily deserve.
Treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath. When the day of judgement finally comes, what kind of sentence will we have stored up for ourselves?

We started out today asking the question; "Why do the righteous suffer and the evil prosper?"
"When we see evil people apparently getting away with their evil, what does that say about the judgement of God?"
Is the judgement of God certain? It certainly is. It may not always go at the speed that we might expect, but that's not all bad. Sometimes these things might work in our favor.

If you are having trouble with some situation in your life, if there is something that you need to trust God to resolve in your life, let me give you something to think about:
Our first priority is get ourselves in the situation that God wants us in, and that is trusting in Him and what He tells us.
He tells us to trust Him in what he says, He wants us to believe that His Word is true. Go ahead and do that immediately.

Once we believe that His Word is true, then we learn that His Word tells us how to be forgiven through Jesus Christ. Now go ahead and do that also.

Then we get into other issues, like "Why do the evil prosper, and the righteous suffer?"
Think about Abraham: if we were in Abraham's place, we would have to wait more than 400 years for God's promise to us to be fulfilled.
During that time, the land that had been promised to our children had been possessed by our enemies, those that hated us.
Also, during those 400 years, our children were slaves in a land that was not theirs. Wow; the evil were in charge, and the people of God were suffering.
But why was Abraham a hero of the faith? Because he knew that God's promise to give him the land was as sure and certain as God Himself.
He knew that God's promises to give him children to live in that land were as certain as God Himself.
Did Abraham live to see all those things happen? No. Did they all happen? Yes. Pick up a history book; pick up the paper.
Will Abraham someday live again in his flesh and see how it all came together just like God said?
Absolutely.

Took a while, didn't it?



Can we trust in the promises of God? I can't think of any reason why not.
Does that mean that everything will always go right in our lives, that all our problems will be resolved? Probably not, I don't think Abraham's were.
Does that mean that we should adopt Solomon's answer; pursue mirth, eat, drink and be merry, for that is as good as it gets?
No, that's just a half-truth. The normal, natural things of life are truly given to us by God to enjoy, but all those things are merely temporary.
The best thing we can do with them is be thankful for what we have, and appreciate them as down payment on what God has planned for us in the future with Him.
God has a wonderful plan for our future, but we need to cooperate with it.

If we fail to cooperate with it, then we despise His goodness for us, and we keep our hearts fully set to do evil.
If there is someone here today that has never availed themselves of the patience and longsuffering of God toward them, then you need to do it today.
Don't abuse the patience of God. Don't think to take a selfish advantage of it. That's playing a losing game, and you have too much to lose.

Stand with me, and while we sing # 163 , if you have never trusted Jesus Christ to take away your sins, let me invite you to come down to this altar and do it today.
God tells us; "Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation."
Why wait? What good would that do? None at all. What will you do with Jesus Christ today? What will your answer be to Him?