The Problem of Life With God

The last few weeks in my single’s class I’ve been teaching from Tommy Nelson’s book, The Problem of Life with God.
The book takes a close, in depth look at the book of Ecclesiastes, which besides the book of Phillipians is probably one of my favorite books of the Bible.
King Solomon is so brutally honest in the book it amazes me.
He says many things that as a “good Christian” you have to ask yourself, “Can he say that?”
This week we looked at chapter three of the book.
Chapter three is where Solomon really gets honest.
“There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven,” Solomon writes.
Then he begins to explain that there is a time to be born, a time to die, a time to kill and a time to heal.
At the end of his commenting on life he takes a moment and makes a very human response.
“What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men,” Solomon said.
Solomon saw the soveriegnty of God and realized he didn’t exactly like it.
That means that life is going to be ruff and tough and unfair and there’s nothing you can do about it.
You’re going to get a call someday saying your parents are dying, you’re going to have a serious tooth cavity and you might loose that great job because of coorporate downsizing.
And Solomon looks at the facts of life and says, “What’s the point? What do we gain from our toil? Why do we work so hard when we have no control over anything in our lives?”
Now that all sounds super depressing, but luckily Solomon doesn’t leave us hanging.
“He has made everything beautiful in His time… I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere Him.”
Solomon looks closer and decides that while God’s sovereignty can be troubling, we can find comfort in knowing that He is in control in all things.
In The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, she tells that the one thing she hated most about the concentration camps was the bed bugs.
One day as they’re saying their prayers, her sister instructs her, “Thank God for the bed bugs. Corrie, thank God for the lice.”
She couldn’t understand why. It was the worst part of being stuck indoors. They bit her and made her misserable.
Then a few weeks after her prayer her and her sister began a Bible study in their room.
They feared everyday that the guards would break in and stop them.
She found out later that the reason the guards stayed out, was they were afraid of the lice. The one thing that Corrie couldn’t stand was the one thing that saved her everyday.
Only God could use a bed bug.
So don’t fret when the down times come, because it will all be made beautiful in His time.
It may not make sense that very day, but when the time comes. It will all be made perfectly clear.
And in closing — big props to Heath Peloquin at First Baptist Church Belton.
Excellent message Sunday night. Excellent.