Episode Transcript
Good morning.
It's 10 o'clock.
We're ready to start.
We almost finished verse 13 in chapter 5 of Job.
So if you'll turn there this morning.
And while you're turning, I wanted to encourage those of you who are faithful to attend.
And to tune in, they're just as valuable, the ones who tune in to our weekly Bible teaching Did you know that your faithfulness is a ministry?
You may not have ever thought that you had a ministry or any kind of talent, but you do.
God has impressed upon you the importance of being faithful.
And He's given you the time and the health, the Means of getting here or of tuning in, and in return for those gifts that God's given you that you may not have considered, maybe you have.
You're ministering to everyone else's here.
Even the people online who see someone else tuning in online.
That's an encouragement.
And whether you have any other talent or not, and you probably do, but even if you didn't, your faithfulness is an encouragement to me.
And I'm not looking for a crowd of people to cheer me on.
I'm looking for faithful Christians who would rather be taught God's word than anything else on Sunday morning.
And here you are.
And not only do you encourage me, but you encourage the people around you, too.
Often wondered what it would be like to have a teleprompter as a teacher.
I don't think I'd like it.
I've read off a teleprompter before when I was doing a public service announcement for a place where I worked.
And they have to adjust your reading speed to the speed of that teleprompter.
And so you're locked in, and everybody sees your eyes moving.
They know you're not shooting from the hip or that you didn't memorize what you're saying.
So I don't think I'd like that, but it might be an interesting thing to try sometime.
And it limits your freedom of what you want to say.
Our notes are just that, they're notes.
We don't read directly from them most of the time.
But I think I'll stay with what we have.
Now, last week we ended our study with the phrase: the council of the Froward is carried headlong.
And one of the reasons I don't share my notes with people is because every time that I type the word froward, I type the word forward instead.
So that's why, if you ever say, Brother Andy, we had a man a long, long time ago who used to go to church here.
He said, Why don't you just let me have your notes?
And he was serious.
I said, No, sir.
And I said, You need to write your own notes because they'll mean more to you if you write them than if you look at mine.
But that was a secret reason I didn't tell him about.
I have a lot of grammatical errors and spelling errors.
That I didn't pick up originally.
And so the Council of the Froward is carried headlong.
And this saying goes right along With the first few words of this verse, which says, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
And the end result of the wisdom of the crafty, the froward, because remember, crafty can be good too.
But in this case, it's not.
The end result of all of that is destruction.
That the end result of the wisdom of God is salvation.
And those are the two ends that people face.
They face one or the other.
Destruction or salvation.
Froward people reject God's counsel.
They walk in the counsel of the ungodly.
They stand in the way of sinners.
They sit in the seat of the scornful, as we read from Psalm chapter 1 last week.
And therefore, they are headed toward destruction.
Their counsel is carried headlong.
And their continuation, the outcome of their Froward Council is accelerated.
That's what carried headlong means.
It's accelerated.
And it's accelerated toward destruction.
And they don't think that's the case.
That's what's so tragic.
Psalm chapter 55 and verse 23, Psalm 55, 23, the psalmist wrote, But Thou, O God, shall bring them down into the pit of destruction.
Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days.
But I will trust in thee.
So if you don't live out half your days, that means that your froward counsel very well may cut your life short.
Now, there are some fine Christians who die at an early age.
Charles Spurgeon was one of them.
I think he died at 58.
My grandfather on my mother's side, Ray Wood, died when he was 68.
That's young.
It gets younger every year that I get closer to 68.
So a short life doesn't mean someone honored Froward Council, but Froward Council can certainly contribute to early destruction.
And he said their blood guiltiness and deceit are carried headlong.
Here's a passage out of 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 that Expounds upon that.
First Thessalonians chapter five, verses two through three.
For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.
For when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape.
Sudden means unawares.
So those who say peace and safety, which would be the group of people who honor Froward Council.
Those who say peace and safety think we have all the time in the world.
We're going to live long lives.
We're going to do what we want for as long as we want.
They get cut off suddenly, unawares.
They can't anticipate the timing of that destruction, and they can't prevent it.
On the way to church this morning, my wife and I were talking about various things, and one of the things that entered our conversation was about people who worry.
About their death, worry about what might cause them to die and if they're going to get cancer or have an accident or whatever it may be, and how Worrying about that doesn't do any good.
It doesn't change the outcome.
And that God has the appointment book for our death.
He knows exactly when it is.
And so, to sit around and worry about it is a waste of time, and it certainly is stressful.
I have a dear friend, he's been a good friend for a long time, and he's a Christian.
But his daddy died of cancer when he was little.
And for his whole life, my friend worried, and I mean he was anxious that he would one day get cancer.
And in his early 60s, he got cancer.
And it was the thing that he'd worry about his whole life that came to pass.
And I think perhaps had he never worried about it and still gotten it, his life would have been a lot less anxious.
But we're dealing here with the froward and how they shall not live out half their days.
And their counsel and their evil ways are carried headlong.
Here's a good example.
You may not need another example, but I'm going to give you one anyway because the teleprompter says I have to.
Think of driving a car from this church to the Kauffman County Courthouse.
It's 19 miles.
And once you get on to US 175, the speed limit is seventy.
And if you drive the speed limit, you'll reach your destination in about eighteen minutes.
And that accounts for the Traffic lights here before you get on the highway.
And I know that if I follow the directions on the map, I will surely get there.
But if I decided to drive 120 miles an hour on US 175, what would happen?
Well, it'd be foolish.
But as long as I weren't pulled over by a law enforcement officer, I would arrive at the courthouse in less than 18 minutes.
My excessive unlawful speed would carry me headlong to the courthouse.
And that's what the counsel of the Frouard does.
It carries them headlong, but the ending is terrible.
Let me give you another passage that helps you understand how God deals with the froward.
Speaking of those who hold the truth in unrighteousness, meaning they suppress it or keep it down, the Apostle Paul wrote this in Romans chapter 1 and verse 28.
Romans 1, verse 28.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.
To do those things which are not convenient.
Now remember, the Romans, the letter of the Romans, is written in Greek originally.
And the words gave and over, it said he gave them over to a reprobate mind.
The words gave and over are from the same Greek word and they mean to deliver.
Like, here you go.
And the counsel of those who hold the truth and unrighteousness is the same as the counsel of the Frouard.
It's the same group of people.
They've twisted God's truth.
And that's what that word froured means, that twisted.
And God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient or fitting.
So, their reprobate mind is the thing to which God delivered them.
And it is carried headlong.
As they do the unfitting things their minds desire to do.
That's what God does, He pushes them headlong.
Okay?
You don't like to retain God in your knowledge.
Well, then I'll give you over to the reprobate mind.
You're the crafty, you'll be taken in your own craftiness, as we studied in Job earlier.
Now when God delivers us from sin, then that deliverance prevents us from being carried headlong with Frouard Counsel.
A Christian should not love Froward Council.
We shouldn't think it's funny.
We shouldn't think well You know, if I just had one day to step away from being a Christian, here's what I'd do.
That should never cross our minds.
It should never be enjoyable to us.
Let me say that.
I'm sure in that.
That mind, that carnal mind we have, those terrible thoughts cross through, but we shouldn't say, Oh, I'd love to do that.
Christians should never love Froward Council.
And that's why you need to come to church and hear God's word taught.
It's why you need to read your Bible and memorize scripture and devote yourself to prayer.
But when you know counsel is froured, you know it's twisted, you should never love it, you should never prefer it, you should love godly counsel.
Because godly counsel carries us headlong into salvation.
Because godly counsel told us that Jesus died for sinners.
That he rose again for our justification, and that whoever believes on him shall not come into condemnation.
We won't go the place that Froward Council is carried.
But if a person will not repent, now we don't know when their last opportunity is.
But if that person will not repent, then God will deliver him hastily to the destructive desires of their hearts.
That's exactly what Froward Counsel does.
It carries you headlong into destruction.
Look now in verse 14, Job 5:14, if you're just tuning in.
It says they meet with darkness in the daytime.
Of course, we want to be clear.
As to who they are, who the word they represents.
And using the context of our previous two verses.
We can conclude that they are the froward, the crafty, and the wise.
The froward who are crafty and wise.
And our verse says they meet with darkness.
Now, to understand what this means, so that it's not limited to our understanding of darkness, midnight.
Let's go back to the very first few verses of the Bible in Genesis chapter 1.
And I'm going to read you verses 1 through 5.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness.
Was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light.
And there was light.
And God saw the light that it was good.
And God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Now, until God spoke light into the world, there was darkness.
We read that very clearly.
So darkness was a creation, light was a creation, and God divided those two creations.
I'll show you an example of how he did that.
In Exodus chapter 14, God was about to lead the children of Israel.
On dry ground across the bed of the Red Sea.
And he had divided that Red Sea after Moses stretched out his hand over the waters.
I'll read verses 19 through 20.
This is Exodus 14, verses 19 through 20.
And the angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel. removed and went behind them, and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face and stood behind them.
And it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel.
And it was a cloud and darkness to them, that is, to the Egyptians.
But it gave light by night to these that would be the camp of Israel, so that the one came not near the other all the night.
Now the pillar of the cloud was the visual representation of God to the children of Israel.
And you have that many times in the Old Testament.
You have the ladder of Jacob representing Jesus Christ, the burning bush representing Jesus Christ.
And the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire were those visible signs that God used to show the children of Israel: I'm leading you and I'm protecting you.
His promise should have been enough, but these were a hard-hearted bunch of people just like you and I are in our flesh.
So he showed them with their eyes something they could look at.
Now notice where the cloud went in that passage I read you.
It went between the Egyptians and the children of Israel.
It divided them.
And that passage tells us that the pillar of cloud was darkness.
To the Egyptians.
But that same pillar of cloud was light to the children of Israel.
Another way of saying this was the Egyptians met with darkness in the daytime.
Now if they'd been on the other side of the pillar of the cloud, they would have met light as they do in the daytime.
The Egyptians were unbelievers.
They were the enemies of God.
And although this passage here spoke of a literal light and darkness in that cloud, Let's look a little deeper at the spiritual truth that's also taught here and that I believe will help us understand our text in Job.
In John chapter 1, verses 4 through 5, John chapter 1, verses 4 through 5, speaking of Jesus.
The Apostle John wrote, In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.
So you have a description there of a Savior because that's who the light is.
Jesus is the light of the world.
You have a description of the Savior being born into the darkness of this world.
And to this dark, sinful world, the Savior brought light.
He brought salvation, but darkness didn't lay hold of it, didn't seize that light.
The word comprehend means to seize or to take hold of.
Instead, the darkness comprehended it not.
It was there, but the darkness said, Nope, don't want any part of that.
Now the Jews were the very people whom Jesus came to seek and to save.
That was the lost house of Israel.
That was his object.
The ones to whom the gospel first came.
He said, The Son of Man hath come to seek and save that which was lost.
That's Luke 19:10, I believe.
The gospel came first to the Jews.
They were entrusted with the gospel.
However, those unbelieving Jews to whom Jesus preached in his day on earth We were no different, spiritually speaking, than the unbelieving Egyptians who were on the wrong side of the light in the pillar of cloud.
The Pharisees, whom we read about in the New Testament a lot, especially in the Gospels, they were the most religious Jews.
And they met with light when they met Jesus.
They were in darkness, spiritually speaking.
And they saw a great light.
Now that was something Isaiah had prophesied: that the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.
But those Pharisees, along with many of the other Jews, remained in unbelief.
They rejected the light.
So they meet with darkness in the daytime.
Now let's look back at the second part of our text in Job chapter 5, verse 14.
And this is continuing to talk about those people who meet with the darkness, the froward, the wise, crafty, froward ones.
It says, and grope in the noonday as in the night.
They grope, meaning they feel around to search for something.
For almost two years, I've been assigned to work the deep night shift at my job.
Thankfully, I'm on the other end of the week, an answer to prayer, as we've said before.
And with my glasses on, when I'm driving, I have pretty good vision at night.
However, when I go into a dark house to look for someone or to answer an alarm call, I can't see without my flashlight.
In fact, it would be quite dangerous to try to navigate The inside of the house of a stranger or a dark field behind someone's barn without my flashlight.
When we train rookies, we impress upon them the importance of not only having one fully charged flashlight, but of having two.
And our saying is, two is one and one is none.
You need a backup.
But the flashlight is extremely important, and when my flashlight is working, I don't have to grope in the darkness.
I don't have to trip over things any more than I normally would during the daytime.
The light makes all the difference.
And it's easy to understand why I would.
Have to grope in the night if I didn't have any light.
But what if it were daytime?
Is it possible that I could be working in the daytime and still have to grope as though I were in the darkness?
Well, there's really only one way that could happen, and that is if I were blind.
Oh, a blind person may be able to sense the brightness of the light.
Or the sun, but they can't see.
And it does him no good when it comes to finding his way or locating something.
Depending on the seriousness of the blindness.
Now, spiritually speaking, a person would grope in the light if he were spiritually blind.
And that's why most of the people who have ever been born are still groping, even though the light of Jesus Christ has shined into this world.
He dies on the cross in front of all these witnesses.
And a centurion says, surely this was the Son of God.
Even Pontius Pilate said, I find no fault in this man.
Jesus told those Jews, I am the one who Moses spoke of.
The one you're depending on, Moses, I'm the one he spoke of.
And he rose again, and he was seen of witnesses.
His gospel is preached all over the world by witnesses.
In John chapter 3, verse 19.
Says, and this is the condemnation that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
Jesus, the light of the world, came to people who could see, but they went like this.
They preferred not to see.
And it's because their deeds are evil.
In the darkness of night, I depend on my flashlight to guide my way.
In the darkness of sin, I depend on Jesus, my light, to guide my way, because I surely couldn't do it on my own.
Now, putting what we've learned about this verse together with the previous two verses, the conclusion is this, or I'll state it this way.
The Frower love their craftiness and wisdom.
They love their evil deeds, and therefore they hate the light.
So when they walk in the daytime, it is darkness to them, and that's by their own preference.
When they're in the presence of the noonday, they grope as though they had no light.
And that's just hard-headed and hard-hearted.
Can you imagine if I were clearing a house with another deputy and he had no flashlight?
And suppose he kept running into furniture and tripping over toys and injuring himself.
And I offered him a flashlight.
I said, hey, here's a light.
And he said, nope.
Well, most of us would think him to be a fool, wouldn't we?
We'd say, well, go ahead then.
Help yourself.
And did you know the majority of people are that way?
They'd take a flashlight in a dark house, but they would reject the light of the world that's come to save them.
And whether they believe in a God of some sort or no God at all, they're groping about in the noonday.
And when we preach the gospel to them, when you pass out a track, and maybe one of them scans that QR code on his phone and finds the website.
And says, I don't need that.
I'd rather go over here and scroll through Facebook reels.
I don't need that.
That's for later.
That's for old people.
That's for the Bible Belt.
But when we preach that gospel to them, we're preaching light because we know they're in darkness.
2 Corinthians chapter 4, verses 3 through 5.
2 Corinthians 4, verses 3 through 5, Paul wrote, But if our gospel be hid, It is hid to them that are lost, in whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not. lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves, your servants, for Jesus' sake.
So the gospel we preach is light.
And the God of this world is Satan in that passage, and he hates light.
And he blinds the minds of those who hear the gospel.
Preached, so they won't receive salvation as they read that tract, as they hear that message, that faithful witness who cares for their souls telling them about Jesus.
And Satan all the while is saying, You don't need that.
You're doing fine.
All that's going to do is restrict your.
Your activities, and it's not going to be any fun, and you're going to have to go to church all the time and get dressed up.
Boy, there's no telling what Satan whispers to people's minds.
But the people whose minds he blinds also carry responsibility for rejecting the light.
They might say, well, the devil made me like this.
I'm not believing because the devil told me not to.
But they discount the power of God's Spirit when they do that.
Because God's word teaches that the Spirit of God draws men to the light, regardless of what Satan's doing.
John 6, 44, John 6, 44 says, No man can come to me.
That's Jesus speaking.
Except the Father which hath sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
So the ones who are drawn to Jesus Who believe on Jesus, he has promised to raise them up at the last day in that resurrection.
They'll be raised up.
There's not anything the devil can do about it.
Now, why then would a person refuse the light of the glorious gospel?
Because his deeds are evil.
He hates the light.
He prefers the darkness.
Now, not only among the godless do we see this.
But it's also evident in churches who profess to believe in God.
But those churches have a gospel that adds to the finished work of Jesus.
They find the light of the glorious gospel insufficient to dispel the darkness of sin.
They've added Prayers and rituals, baptisms, other human efforts.
And it's as though they brought an extra light.
In case the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ weren't enough.
I remember we had a Dinner over here one time after a funeral for one of our members.
This was years ago.
And one of the gentlemen there, who was a family friend or relative, was a member of the Church of Christ.
And the pastor was talking to him, and I was standing there listening, which is what I usually do when he's talking.
I want to listen to what he says.
I steal everything I can, by the way.
And so he asked the man what he believed about salvation, and the man gave the response you would expect from somebody from the church of Christ that you've got to.
Believe in the gospel and then be baptized, and you've got to live right and all those things to stay saved.
And So, the way the pastor put it, when the man said, In addition to what Jesus did on the cross, you've got to be baptized and you've got to live right.
He said, so it's kind of like gap insurance for y'all.
And boy, that thought never left my mind.
That's what it is.
It's like gap insurance.
Or here, it's like having an extra light just in case What Jesus did wasn't enough in their minds.
And those people It's sad.
They go to church.
They sing hymns.
I've often said, I'd like to go to the Church of Christ singing service and then leave before the preaching and get over here and listen to the preaching.
I mean, I love our singing, and I would never, never do that, but those thoughts have crossed my mind.
Some of the most beautiful, harmonized voices, oh, they're wonderful.
Now I'm going to argue they do use a musical instrument.
I asked one one time, I said, what's that pitch pipe y'all use to get everybody on kids?
It's a musical instrument, isn't it?
And I'm glad they use it.
Otherwise, everybody just start wherever they want to start, right?
But they go to church, they sing the hymns, they take communion, they do all these things, and then they do it all over again.
Yet they continue to grope as in the noonday because you ask one of them, Are you saved?
Well, yeah, I think so.
I think I've got all the boxes checked here, but you know, I've got to keep living right.
My pastor said we have to do this and that.
What a miserable condition that would be to always wonder.
But Eliphaz here gives us some encouragement on the heels of the condemning truth that he just told us.
And that's in verse 15.
Starting with the word but, he said, but he saveth.
But he saveth.
Now let's just stop right there.
In verses 12 through 14, we read that God disappointeth the devices of the crafty.
That he taketh the wise in their own counsel, and the froward grope in the noonday, but he saveth.
Now that's the hope shared by all who have put their trust in Jesus and exclusively in his work.
From my frowardness, I'm talking about me personally, from my frowardness, my craftiness, God has saved me.
From my devices he saved me.
Jesus took upon himself the sin of my own crafty, wise, froward counsel, and he washed it away in his own blood.
He drew me, I believed, and I can tell the lost sinner today, the one who is swallowed up and groping in the noonday, but he saveth.
Even to the one who has failed to come to the light of the glorious gospel, the one who holds the Bible in his hand.
Maybe reads the life-giving words and commits them to memory, and yet disregards the salvation which is of the Lord.
I say to that person, but he saveth.
You don't have to grope.
Do you need encouragement today?
Maybe somebody does.
In the frowardness of your man-made religion, if that's what you have, the one that makes man the champion of his own salvation.
You're still empty.
You keep trying the same thing over and over again, but you find no peace.
You think you're without hope and condemned and on your way to an eternity separated from God.
But may I say to you the same thing that Eliphaz told Job, but he saveth.
Look back in verse 15 to see whom he saves.
He says the poor.
The poor, that means wretched or oppressed.
It's often translated as the word needy in the Old Testament.
Now financially speaking, a poor person is one who does not have enough assets to meet the requirements for basic daily living.
If a person has no food, no clothing, that person is of the poorest of men.
He's relying on others to meet his basic needs.
I'll tell you who's not poor, and that's a person who chooses to Blow his money, be unwise with her money, rather than obeying the scriptures.
Rather than being like the ant, he's like the grasshopper.
According to the federal agency called the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, The poverty level for a single person in the United States is $15,960.
Now you may say, well, there's no way anyone could live on that amount.
Yes, you could.
At the average U.
S.
Army Corps of Engineers campsite, you pay $10 a night.
For a tent site.
And they usually have restrooms and running water. $10 a night.
For the whole year, that's $3,650.
A two-person tent, and I mean a good one from Walmart, is about $30.
Pillow, pillowcase, blanket.
Maybe all of that, $50, $75.
A bar of soap, $2.
Toothpaste, $2.
Get ultra bright.
Loaf of bread, two dollars, a jar of peanut butter, three or four dollars.
Water's free.
A cup, a dollar, and I could go on for less than $4,000.
You could have a nice setup in a tent and have lots of money, lots of your almost $16,000 left over.
For matches and cooking utensils and a towel and a washcloth and maybe some other types of food.
You may think, Brother Andy, that's a little unreasonable to expect a person to live in a tent.
Well, God didn't think so.
His chosen people, the children of Israel, lived in tents as they moved about that desert.
In our country, we have a really twisted definition of the word poor, don't we?
I could go on and on about that, but let's take this word poor.
And let's learn a spiritual truth about it.
Now, in the Bible, the poor represent not only the people who have little to nothing they can contribute to their own daily needs.
But it also, the poor represent those who are the least esteemed among men.
The religious hypocrite pays them no regard.
The wealthy who are wicked see the poor as subhumans who are a blight on humanity.
And just as the blind and the lame and the disabled are often written off by people in society, so are the poor.
Now spiritually speaking, a poor person has nothing to contribute to his salvation.
That makes every one of us poor, doesn't it?
And a person without salvation is poor, whether he's rich in the things of this world or not.
Listen to what Jesus said to the church at Laodicea.
In Revelation chapter 3, verses 14 through 17.
Revelation 3, 14 through 17.
Listen for the word poor.
Toward the end.
And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God, I know thy works. that thou art neither hot cold nor hot.
I would thou wert cold or hot so then, because thou art lukewarm And neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
Because thou sayest, listen to this: thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.
Now we would define that as a rich person in this world, or at least someone who's very well off.
And he said, And knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.
Jesus clearly teaches that a person who is rich, increased with goods, and has need of nothing, is not only poor, but he's wretched.
And remember, in our text back in Job, that word poor means wretched.
And such a person who has all these things Is also miserable and blind and naked if that's all he has.
Without the gospel, he's poor.
Without the light of the glorious gospel, he's blind.
Without the robe of righteousness obtained through faith in the gospel, he's naked.
And all of these things we were.
In some measure or another, but he saveth the poor.
And next week we'll Continuing verse 15, where we see the thing from which God saveth the poor.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you this morning for all those who were faithful to come and to tune in and who have a hunger for your word.
And Lord, I pray you'd found it was faithfully taught and that you'd blot away anything that was confusing or misleading so that the people would meditate only upon truth.
And Lord, that you would increase our faith, that you would strengthen us for the work that you've called us to.
We pray during the next hour.
That the singing, the praying, the encouragement we have for one another, and the preaching of your word would be honoring to you in Jesus' name.
Amen.
