Episode Transcript
Good morning.
It's ten o'clock.
Let's take our Bibles and turn to Job chapter five.
Job chapter five.
And once you've turned there, I want you to also mark your place in 1 John chapter 3.
So we're in Job chapter 5, but we want to mark 1 John chapter 3.
Not the Gospel of John, but 1 John.
Because we're going to come back to that chapter later in our lesson.
All right, once you've marked your spot in 1 John chapter 3, go back to Job chapter 5.
As we continue our verse-by-verse study of this profound book.
And I'd like to welcome all of you who are watching us by way of the internet.
Sometimes we see comments from people who live on the other side of the globe, and that is so encouraging to us.
But whether you're in the auditorium or watching from Africa, where some watch from, or maybe you're as close as Athens, Texas, we're thankful you took the time to study the Bible with us.
And our study last week concluded in Job chapter 5, verse 4.
So let's return there this morning.
Where Job's friend Eliphaz had been speaking the truth about the foolish ones and their children.
And he said they were far from safety.
Their children were far from safety.
And we examined the words far from safety last week.
But as is almost always the case, there's more to say about it than what I said.
There always is.
And what I've found is when I was sharing this with Brother Fulton last week, when I leave off, wherever we leave off, that's my starting place next time.
And so I'll restudy that, and I'll have a whole lot more to say about it because the scriptures just keep speaking.
And that's a wonderful thing as a teacher.
So we're talking about this word safety here in the Bible.
And from God's point of view, Safety is not some haphazard state of security in which we hope to find ourselves.
When someone's thinking about moving to a city, a new city, one of the things he may be interested in is whether the neighborhood is safe.
Now we all want to be safe, don't we?
So we may look at the crime rate or talk to people who live there, who work there.
But no matter what he does and no matter where he moves, his safety cannot be guaranteed.
We can't guarantee people's safety My profession cannot guarantee people's safety.
Well, God operates quite differently when He tells us how we can be safe.
And in fact, we'll use the example of the children of Israel and look at some of the words God spoke through Moses to those people in the Old Testament.
In Leviticus chapter 25, verses 18 through 19, if you're taking notes, Leviticus 25, 18 through 19.
He said, Wherefore ye shall do my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do them, and ye shall dwell in the land in safety.
And the land shall yield her fruit, and ye shall eat your fill, and dwell therein in safety.
He said it twice.
God promised the children of Israel that they would live in safety by obeying his statutes, his laws, and keeping his judgments.
In other words, whatever God said was to be what the people were to say.
So if God said it, they say.
That's what confession is: saying the same thing as God.
However, God judged a matter was the way the people were supposed to judge a matter.
So, if God judged that a particular action was wrong, then the people were to say the same thing.
Now, that's what.
Mankind has gotten away from.
In fact, the devil started that when he was Lucifer in heaven and decided to say something different than what God said.
And so he was evicted permanently, and he has a place along with his angels that he's reserved for.
Well, let me tell you about the way God judges a matter.
Is declared for us in His Word.
So it ought to be simple.
We want to know what the Bible says.
We look at it, and we should just say, I agree with that.
And that's the way we ought to live our lives.
That's the way we ought to tell others about what God's word says.
But man has fallen away from that.
Churches have fallen away from that.
This fellow, Tolerico, who's running for office in the state of Texas, he's a Democrat, and his main problem for me is not as much his political party as what he believes about the church and the Bible.
Christians and so forth.
I don't recommend you read after him.
Just take my word for it.
He doesn't seem to agree with what the Bible says, although he says he does.
But there's one problem with this judging as God judges, and that is our flesh.
It seems simple, doesn't it?
I read it, I say amen, it's in the Bible.
But our flesh says, well, wait a minute, and that's the problem.
If the children of Israel had always been wise, Then they would have kept God's statutes and judgments.
They would always have agreed with God.
And then they would have always dwelt in safety.
Well, you may not remember a whole lot about our studies in the Kings and in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, but what you probably would acknowledge is that they didn't always live in safety.
And as the Leviticus passage tells us, dwelling in safety comes with some pretty nice perks for Israel.
In safety, the land would yield her fruit.
That's what it said.
Now that means there would be no droughts, no famines.
In safety, they would eat their fill.
They would never miss meals because of a lack of food, because of a lack of The land producing.
And I'd call those some pretty fine benefits.
In fact, we would probably agree that anyone who would not want their land to yield its fruit would be foolish.
I can't imagine a farmer ever saying, well, I hope all this hard work I put in doesn't result in anything.
I certainly don't say that about my garden.
By the way, I know God created rabbits for a reason.
I'm not going to question that at all.
But they sure do irritate me.
We've had to buy more seeds because when those shoots get up that high They nip them, or they do like Barney Fife.
They nip it in the bud and it doesn't grow back.
But that's my garden doesn't dwell in safety.
We live in a fallen world.
But I would say this: there's nobody that I know of who'd want to miss a meal on a regular basis.
And I'm not talking about fasting.
I'm talking about what foolishness does.
The foolish, their children are far from safety.
And God said, You keep my statutes and my judgments, and you'll dwell in the land in safety.
Now, let's peel back another layer of this truth.
About dwelling in the land in safety, specifically when it comes to the land yielding its fruit.
And this carries us all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, verses 17 through 19.
And this is God speaking to Adam.
He said, And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it.
Cursed is the ground for thy sake and in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee And thou shalt eat the herb of the field in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground for out of it was thou taken.
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
When Adam and Eve lived in obedience to God, this was before sin entered into the world.
They dwelt in safety in the garden in every way.
The trees bore fruit.
From which they ate until they were full.
Now, those are the two things that God promised the children of Israel in that Leviticus passage.
That the land would bear its fruit and they would eat their fill.
And that's exactly what Adam and Eve did in the garden when they dwelt in safety.
The ground did not bear thorns and thistles during that time.
There was no death.
It was the perfect garden, and all Adam had to do was dress it and keep it.
He didn't have to buy a weed killer.
He didn't have oxalus.
I don't know if oxalus was in the garden.
Maybe it's good to eat, but I'm calling it a weed, so maybe that wasn't proliferating in the garden.
But see what happened in this safety.
Man became foolish.
Eve listened to the serpent rather than God, and Adam listened to his wife rather than God.
And their foolishness not only caused them to be far from safety, the safety they enjoyed in that garden.
But they would never again enjoy the fruitfulness of that safe place, that place that bore fruit and no weeds.
The fruit they ate and with which they were filled.
And in order to eat from then on, after sin entered into the world.
Man would toil by the sweat of his face among the thorns and thistles.
And he'd have to eat from cursed ground all the days of his life.
And tying this back into our text in Job.
All of man's children would be born outside that garden.
And that would be far from safety.
That was a safe place, that garden.
No enemies there.
No bloodshed.
And everyone born outside that garden would do as their father Adam had done.
And of the foolish who took root, Eliphaz said his children are far from safety.
And now I want us to look a little more closely at the word children there.
Now, I don't think we struggle too much trying to figure out what children are, because every one of us has been a child, and if you're young enough, you're still a child.
And our state family code says the child is anyone under the age of 18.
And we tend to have a limited view of the word child and children. because we've become accustomed to equating the word children with young people.
And the most obvious truth about children is that they're product of their parents.
The union between their parents, and they come into this world by their mother's womb.
That's an obvious truth about children.
Children are the combination Of the genetic characteristics of not only their birth parents, I heard New York's calling them the mother a gestational parent now.
How about that?
I'd like to ask one of those fools that goes before Congress, can a man gestate?
They'd just drive him crazy, wouldn't it?
Well, I'm glad the Bible's not confusing like that.
But the children are a combination of those characteristics of their birth parents, but also of the parents of those parents.
And so forth.
Now, if I showed you a picture of my mother's father, you'd say, boy, you are a spitting image of Ray Wood.
And I am.
I look just like him.
Now, he's not my dad.
He was my grandfather.
And all the way back, you would find physical characteristics that I share with.
People in my family tree who I never met who were not alive when I was born.
And so, in a physical genetic sense, I'm a child of my grandfather.
But there's another aspect of the word children to look at here because we've been talking about the biological offspring.
And in addition to being the biological offspring of our parents, we are also the moral offspring of our parents.
Now, absent outside influences, a child learns what his mother and father teach him, and he acts accordingly.
Sometimes that's kind of embarrassing, isn't it?
So he's physically their child, biologically. and also morally their child.
And this is one reason parents need to spend as much time with their children as they can.
And in a perfect situation, you could make that happen.
Where the parents were the only influences over the children.
But in our society and in any society around the world, Most children either go to school with other children or they're around other children, or they come to church and they're around people.
They see folks at the grocery store.
They have kids in the neighborhood.
They're under the influence of teachers other than their parents.
They watch television, listen to the radio, and now have unfettered access to social media.
And so they children process all these moral influences they receive from all these different sources.
And they become the children of those moral influences.
Now that's a scary thought, isn't it?
I remember when I was in school, and Michael Jackson was one of the popular singers.
And he just wore one glove.
I guess he lost his other one, and he got famous doing it.
And there's kids that wear one glove.
And I thought, I'm not doing that.
That's foolish.
But that those people, those kids, were moral children.
Of Michael Jackson in that respect, whether they did anything else like he did or not This is kind of a scary thought, but let's suppose we had a laboratory type of situation where we could restrict the influence of the children.
To only the mother and the father.
They would be the only ones in this perfect situation who had influence over their children.
Would that moral instruction be enough to keep those children morally straight?
Now, it would be far better than allowing outside influences and messages to be put in their minds, but the answer is no.
Because even in the case of good parents, there's that old enemy called the flesh.
And I can promise you, just in my own experience raising my three daughters and wife, that The things I told them to do or not do wasn't always perfect.
The way I went about being a dad, being a husband, but we're talking about children, so being a dad.
Wasn't always perfect.
Now, I am a perfect grandfather, but we're not talking about that right now.
But it's the flesh.
And as good a parent as Job was.
Now he was a good dad.
He had a rebellious wife, didn't he?
We read about her.
He offered sacrifices every morning in case his children had cursed God in their hearts.
Because Job knew something, and that was that foolishness was a constant foe.
It was an enemy waiting, lurking around the corner, just like the devil does.
So we've looked at the concept of children in a physical sense, in a moral sense, and now let's look at the concept of children in a spiritual sense.
Because what Elipha said about the children of the foolish applies in all three of these areas.
I'm going to read a passage from 1 John.
Chapter three.
So I think you sh you probably marked that place in your Bible.
And it's a little longer passage than I would normally read.
I normally don't read 10 verses in a row.
But I want to use it so we can learn about the concept of children in a spiritual sense.
So listen as I read 1 John 3, verses 1 through 10.
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.
Now, I underscored that in my notes: sons of God.
Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.
Beloved, now are we the sons of God?
And it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.
Whosoever committeth sin Transgresseth also the law.
For sin is the transgression of the law.
And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins, and in him is no sin.
Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.
Now that means you're a spiritual child of God.
You abide in him.
Whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither hath known him.
Little children, I underscored that too.
Let no man deceive you.
He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.
He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning.
For this purpose, the Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil.
Whosoever is, listen to this, born of God, that's a spiritual child, doth not commit sin.
For his seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God.
In this, the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil.
Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.
Now I know that was a little long.
It has a lot of doctrine in there, and there are several songs that were written from some of the words in there.
I was just singing them in my head.
I can do that.
I usually can't multitask, but I can sing the songs in my head as I read to you, and you never knew it happened, did you?
I know that that was a little long, but I want to underscore some things here in this passage that pertain directly to our text in Job 5, verse 4.
First, John wrote that because the Father's love was bestowed on us, we are the sons of God.
That is a spiritual relationship.
Physically, who are we the sons of?
Sons of Adam, aren't we?
Physically, we're the sons of Adam.
But spiritually, we're the sons of God or the children of God.
And secondly, it said, Jesus was manifested or made known.
To take away our sins.
And this is key to understanding the next verse because the next verse is often confusing to people.
That verse says, Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.
And verse 9 says, Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin.
Now, those two Passages, those two verses, cause all kinds of trouble for some believers.
In fact, many believers have probably struggled with that.
I certainly did until I was taught what it meant, and I thought, oh, well, well, I missed it.
It was right there.
When I believed on the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation.
Was, I think, before you answer, don't answer out loud, just in your head.
When I believed on the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, was my body redeemed right then?
No, you know how I know?
Because I'm still in it.
And it still aches and hurts and gets older and wants to sin and all of that.
That won't happen.
The redemption of the body won't happen until the rapture or resurrection, whichever one I'm caught up in.
And at that point, my body will be changed into a glorious one that does not sin.
However, when I believed on Jesus as my Savior, my spiritual man My inner man was redeemed.
And although this body of sin, as Paul calls it, is going to die and rot in the ground.
My spiritual man will never die.
He was born again.
And it's my spiritual man that never sins.
So when you see that in that.
1 John 3, verses 1 through 10: Whosoever is born of God sinneth not.
Don't think, well, I had a dirty thought this week, or I got angry with my brother without a cause.
I must not be a Christian.
Don't do that.
What you're doing when you do that, you're looking in instead of at the cross.
And that's where people struggle.
They look at what they've done, what they have not done, what they've said, what their thoughts are, their own sincerity.
They look in at their own faith.
Was it good enough?
That's the devil's treadmill.
If you've read one of Brother Fulton's books, you know exactly what that is.
Don't get on that.
So your flesh wants to sin, but your inner man does not want to sin.
They're at war with each other.
And just remember what Jesus said in John chapter 11, verses 25 through 26.
John 11, 25 through 26.
Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
Believest thou this?
And then, thirdly, in the passage in 1 John.
John calls the ones to whom he is writing little children.
Now these are grown men and women.
So he's not talking to them as though they were biologically little children.
These are the children of God.
They're spiritual children.
He's writing to the church.
And he further tells us the difference in the children of God and the children of the devil.
There in that last verse, verse 10, in this the children of God are manifest.
In other words, made known.
And the children of the devil are made known.
Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.
Just let that kind of soak in.
Now, I didn't fully expound the 1 John passage because there's a lot there.
That would take several weeks to do.
But I hope we learn just a little bit more about the expanded definition of children.
What are children?
What that can mean in God's Word.
And going back to our text in Job chapter 5, if you need to turn there, you can just turn back.
And I have some more on this concept of children.
If a saved man and a saved woman have a child, they have a biological child together.
But neither of them can give spiritual life to that child.
He can't do it.
Only God can do that.
And if that child grows up in that house and just rejects the gospel, even though his parents are saved, He'll be condemned because he's not, he's rejected the gospel.
He's rejected the source of spiritual life.
He has said, in his many words, I don't want to be a spiritual child of God.
I'll stick with my spiritual father, the devil.
Jesus told the Pharisees, You are of your father, the devil, and the works of your father you shall do, the lusts of your father you shall do.
That child will be far from safety.
John chapter 8, verses 42 through 44.
John 8, 42 through 44.
We'll just read about that.
Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, You would love me.
For I proceeded forth and came from God.
Neither came I of myself, but He sent me.
Why do ye not understand my speech, even because ye cannot hear my word?
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do.
He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.
Now Jesus didn't tell them, year of your father Levi, or your father Naphtali, or your father Otis.
Or even Adam.
He said, Ye are of your father, the devil.
Now, the devil was not their biological father, he was their spiritual father.
And that same principle applies to a Christian.
Matthew 6, 14, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6, 14, Jesus said, For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
So the key there is the words, heavenly Father.
And when he spoke to his disciples, Jesus reminded them that their heavenly Father, the one with whom they have a spiritual relationship, yes, their creator.
He created them.
But the one with whom they have a spiritual relationship, it's he who forgives sins.
And it is upon him. whom man depends for salvation.
And only in him are his children not far From safety.
Now the children of the foolish men take refuge where their foolish father takes refuge, so they're destroyed being far from safety.
The Apostle Paul taught more on this doctrine in Galatians chapter 3.
Galatians chapter 3, verses 26 through 29.
Somebody says, Well, I want to be a child of God.
Well, here you go.
For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek.
There is neither bond nor free.
There is neither male nor female.
For ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Now, listen to this.
And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise.
Now, although there's a lot of doctrine in this passage, too, let's look just a little bit at the relationship between Christ and his children.
This is a lot of fun for me, by the way.
Now we know that as a man, Jesus never married.
He was pure in every way, and it would have been an unholy thing if he married a sinner from the seed of Adam. and had biological children.
So, and boy, I'll tell you what, I never thought I'd see this, but in Rockwall, Texas.
Pretty conservative city.
These fools are going to show this Jesus Christ superstar.
Don't watch it.
If you've never seen it, don't watch it.
It'll make you sick.
But Jesus was pure in every way.
So there's only one way for a person to be a child of God, and that was not for Jesus to marry a woman and have children. at all.
It's not by biological birth that a person is a child of God, it's by faith in Christ Jesus.
And that Galatian passage also said that if we're Christ's, then we're also Abraham's seed.
Now think about that.
I doubt that anybody in here can trace their family tree.
Yeah, you swab the inside of your mouth and send it off.
I know a bunch of you have done that, and it's kind of interesting to see who.
Who you're related to back there.
It's kind of scary, too.
But you're probably not going to trace your family tree back to Abraham.
So even in the most remote sense, he couldn't possibly be our biological father like Ray Wood is my.
Biological father, even though he's my grandfather, I could be called a child of his because I have characteristics of his.
He passed his DNA down to me.
And so the key here is not whether we are related to Abraham biologically or genetically.
But whether we're related to him spiritually, because that's how we're the seed of Abraham.
We're in Christ.
He was in Christ, that is how we are related to him spiritually.
So, just understand now that the definition of children is not always limited to the immediate biological offspring of a man or woman.
Children are the products of some type of relationship, whether it's physical or moral or spiritual.
And here in our text in Job 5:4, I believe that any of these three aspects, the physical, the moral, the spiritual, perhaps all of them, could apply.
Now, if I'm a fool, that's what we're looking at here.
If I'm a fool and I raise my biological son to be morally foolish, spiritually foolish. then he will be far from safety.
So morally, I have to teach him the proper values of the society we live in, the laws.
The ordinances and all that.
Spiritually speaking, I need to teach him about the Bible and what God's word says about sin and judgment, salvation, eternal life, and every other doctrine.
In fact, how could I say I love my son if I neglect to teach him morally and spiritually?
But as much as I teach him spiritually, I still cannot make him my spiritual child.
Only God can.
And by the way, those two aren't separate, moral and spiritual teachings.
If I teach my child to be spiritually wise, then he will be morally wise as well.
That's a guarantee.
That's where morals come from, they come from the commands in God's word.
And if the children of the foolish are far from safety, look back in your text.
It says, and they are crushed in the gate.
If you're in a place where you can be crushed, you are far from safety.
And when we studied In Job chapter 4, verse 19, several weeks ago, we looked at the word crushed, which means to break into pieces.
Something that is crushed is destroyed, and the children of the foolish are crushed in the gate.
Now, a gate was the door to a city.
And those cities that had gates were surrounded by walls.
Now, it'd be silly to have a gate and no walls on either side of it, wouldn't it?
There's a fella in Fate who has a driveway like that.
He's got a beautiful gate across his driveway, and he doesn't have a lick of fence on either side of it.
And I don't understand it.
It looks pretty dumb.
But it's his property, he can do what he wants to with it.
But that's the purpose of a gate because the walls were to keep the enemies from coming into the city, and therefore.
The gates had to be built in order to let people out and back in to allow a concentrated point for the inspection of goods and the ones who were bringing the goods in.
A gate was, therefore, because there were so many people there.
A gate was a place of greeting, it was a place of judgment.
All sorts of things happened at the gate.
Until Sampson decided to take them off and go out in a pasture with him.
But for the most part, the gates stayed in their place In the book of Ruth, a man named Boaz wanted to buy a parcel of land from Naomi.
He wanted to redeem it.
And there was a law concerning the redemption of land.
It had to go through a certain process, and it had to involve the near kinsmen.
They had to have the opportunity to redeem this land.
Then this was what we might call a probate hearing or some sort of civil hearing after someone had died.
And you know, Naomi's husband died, and Ruth's husband had died.
There just was a lot of death.
Listen to Ruth 4, verses 1 through 2, because I want you to learn a little bit about the gate here.
Ruth 4 verses 1 through 2.
Then went Boaz up to the gate and sat him down there.
And behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by unto whom he said, Ho, such a one, turn aside, sit down here.
And he turned aside and sat down.
And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, Sit ye down here.
And they sat down.
I'm going to skip down to verse 11, same chapter, after Boaz was approved to redeem this land.
It said, And all the people that were in the gate.
And the elders said, We are witnesses.
The Lord make the woman that is come into thine house like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel.
And do thou worthily in Ephrata, and be famous in Bethlehem.
So, what took place in that gate was judgment.
It was a civil judgment on land.
And so, there the gate was a place of judgment.
In 2 Samuel chapter 19, 2 Samuel chapter 19, King David was addressing the people.
Who were concerned that he was mourning over the death of his wicked son Absalom.
And verse 8 says, Then the king arose and sat in the gate.
And they told unto all the people, saying, Behold, the king doth sit in the gate.
And all the people came before the king, for Israel had fled every man to his tent.
So there the gate was a place of assembly.
Where the king greeted the children of Israel.
So the gate had more meaning than we give it now when we think of a gate.
I usually think of a gate.
To a pasture or to maybe to a subdivision, a gated community.
But the Bible says there in Job that in the gate is where the foolish are crushed, where their children are far from safety and they're crushed.
So let's consider this.
Let's think about a son of a foolish man, and that son has come to the gate.
For judgment.
And in our situation, our imaginary situation here, let's suppose this foolish son stole a chariot from his neighbor and was caught joyriding in it.
And so he was arrested and taken to the gate for judgment.
And in that gate, At that gate, the law would have been read: Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet.
Now, this man is guilty of both.
He saw a chariot and he said, I want that, and so he took it.
It wasn't his, it was his neighbor's.
And he stole it.
There's theft.
So you have two offenses rolled into one set of actions.
What hope does this foolish man's son have?
He doesn't have any hope because the law condemns him, so he is far from safety.
And the judges and the people, if they act according to the law, are going to find him guilty.
And I'll tell you what, that'd clean up society right there.
If judges and juries would find people guilty when the evidence is there and if we had truth in sentencing, if two years in jail meant two years in jail.
If five years in prison meant five years in prison, we have all kinds of things.
We've got probation and diversions, and I could go on and on.
And that's the reason why we have so much crime.
We have more crime than we ever have.
And I don't care what the numbers show.
I work the streets.
I know exactly what we have.
It's people are the courts are for some reason not wanting to drop the hammer on people when they commit crimes, especially the repeat offenders.
Did you know there are people we've arrested who have criminal histories, and you have to cut a whole tree down to print it out?
They'll have 25 or 30 arrests on their criminal history.
Now, nobody ought to ever have that many arrests because they shouldn't be out of jail or prison long enough to get arrested that many times.
I'm not dumb, but I'm dumb for right now.
But this foolish man's son is far from safety.
He's far from the safety of a not guilty verdict.
Now, had he been wise, he wouldn't have stolen the chariot, would he?
But because he was foolish and was the child of a foolish man, he is crushed in the gate.
He's crushed by the judgment rendered against him in the gate, which is as we Saw a place of judgment.
Now, there's another gate that will crush the children of the fool, and we're going to talk about that next week because the clock says we're out of time.
Since I trusted it to begin us on time, I better trust it to end us on time.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you again for. .
The opportunity to study your word together, to learn of you.
And Lord, we thank you for the truth that you've given us today and pray that you'd help us to meditate on it and to live by it.
As difficult as it is in the flesh, Father, we know that by your Spirit we'll be able to do this, and you'll receive the glory for it.
In Jesus' name, amen.
