Grosey's Messages

Eccles 3:16 – 4:12 When Corrupt People Oppress You

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 God's Sovereignty

All Is Appointed in God's Time

All Is Appropriate in God's Time

All Is Adjudicated in God's Time

BUT WHEN IT GETS PERSONAL

THEORY DOESN'T CONSOLE

16 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

THE FAILURE OF JOB'S COMFORTERS  THEODICIES

"Free Will" Theodicy

The Finite God theodicy God is good but not powerful

The Best of all possible worlds theodicy,

The Original Sin theodicy.

The Ultimate Harmony theodicy 

LEARN CONTENTMENT IN THE WISDOM AND POWER OF GOD

That we don't understand God's reasons, doesn't mean there aren't sufficient reasons.

God Is Sovereign and all wise, so we should rest content there.

This is my father's world, And though the wrong seem oft so strong

God is the ruler yet.

LEAN ON COMPANIONS

Stabilizing One Another 9,10  "For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is a lone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!"

Supporting One Another 11 "Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; But how can one be warm alone?"

Strengthening One Another  12 Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Sharpening One Another 

SOME REASONS GOD IS NOT STOPPING INJUSTICE TODAY.

1. We live in a fallen world. Romans 8: 18-23

2. God sometimes allows injustice to produce a greater good in our life.  Psalm 73  James 1:2-4

3. God sometimes allows injustice to show us that we need a Saviour.

The Cruelty of Corruption can instill humility in us

The Cruelty of Corruption can instill eternity in us

4. God allows injustice only for a season.

 Romans 12:19 "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is Mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord."

Growth Group Questions

Why does God allow suffering in our world?

How can we encourage a fellow believer when they find there is trouble in their lives?

How would you handle the problem of wicked oppressors in your life?

How do you anger manage in this corrupt world?

Ecclesiastes 3:16 – 4:12    What To Do When Corrupt People Oppress You

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 And God's Sovereignty

All Is Appointed in God's Time        All Is Appropriate in God's Time 

All Is Adjudicated in God's Time

The issue of Power, Oppression, Bullying and Corruption are not new issues that suddenly raised their heads in the last few years. They are a reflection of the sinfulness of man and the horrendous and unloving way we treat other people. Corruption. You don't have to look far to see it. The problem is that people so blur the lines that they just can't see it.

Hatton used parliamentary privilege to expose organised crime in the Griffith mafia, police corruption and malfeasance within government departments and agencies.[7] In 1994, by 46 votes to 45, he forced the minority Fahey Government to establish the Wood Royal Commission into Police Corruption. During the period of the Wood Royal Commission, I understand more than 8000 police in NSW were dismissed. From the report :

"By 1995, the Commission had uncovered hundreds of instances of bribery, money laundering, drug trafficking, fabrication of evidence, destruction of evidence, fraud and serious assaults in the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) at Kings Cross. Participation in misconduct was the norm in the detective division and the senior levels of the CIB in Sydney's inner city were in corrupt relationships with major drug traffickers and the local criminal milieu. " In 1995, the Independent Commission Against Corruption referred a matter to the Commission regarding the possibility of collusion between organised paedophile networks with members from the legal profession, media and political establishment, and the senior ranks of the NSW Police Service and judiciary.   The network operated as a mutual syndicate and was designed to facilitate the distribution of child pornography, the procuring and sharing of underage sexual partners by members, investment in property such as an underage male brothel in Surry Hills and a pooling of resources and information for the purposes of evading law enforcement and maintaining access to illicit markets. Syndicate members also carried on an amphetamine-trafficking enterprise to raise money to help with the significant expense imposed by the requirement to pay bribes, and the high price of illicit materials and services. The relationship between the network and the group of corrupt detectives was extensive and multifaceted, including regular bribe payments to the detectives in exchange for advance warning of law enforcement scrutiny, consignment of large amounts of methamphetamine to the network members on a profit-sharing basis and the planning of insurance frauds and financial crimes. There was an overwhelming body of evidence suggesting the existence of close relationships between police and those involved in the supply of drugs. This encompassed a variety of activities ranging from police turning a blind eye to the criminality of the favoured in return for regular payments, to active assistance when they happened to be caught, to tip-offs of pending police activity, and to affirmative police action aimed at driving out competitors.

Unchecked injustice and oppression make it difficult to see the beauty and coherence in God's design, and such realities raise questions about God's moral governance of the universe. These tensions make it difficult to see how God can be sovereign and also good and just. Delays in God's response to such situations are inexplicable and defy our sense of how things should be. The section connects back to earlier material and confronts us with the tensions for which Qoheleth is well known, as he presents ideas that seem to stand in hopeless conflict.

Justice was a value widely affirmed throughout the ancient Near East. A reform edict of Urukagina of Lagash (ca. 2400 BC) freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, the seizure of their property, and slavery. As a result "the widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful man." Similar comments can be found in other Mesopotamian law codes. The oppression of the weak and poor is also recognized as evil in several Egyptian wisdom compositions.

4:1 I looked and saw all the oppression. Few things call the moral governance of the universe into question like oppression, an idea emphasized through repetition ("oppression . . . oppressed . . . oppressors"). The mistreatment of others raises questions about how such things can be allowed to happen and why nothing is done to stop the evil. Whether this involves the economic oppression in a Dickens novel, slavery in the American South, or the genocides in Africa or the Balkans, such acts epitomize evil and things that ordinary moral sensibilities recognize should never be. The egregious nature of such acts calls into question the nature of humankind and the evil of which humans are capable. Oppression also raises questions about the moral governance of the universe in that many who are oppressed have done nothing to deserve the treatment they are receiving. Another aspect of the tragedy is emphasized by the repetition of the phrase "no comforter." Some people demonstrate their contempt for fellow human beings made in God's image by oppressing them; others show their lack of compassion by failing to show suffering people the basic kindness and respect they deserve.

Look, it is one thing to know this. It is another to experience the effect of cruelty and corruption.

When you experience it, sometimes it affects you deeply.  :2–3 dead . . . happier than the living . . . better [yet ] . . . one who has never been born.  His shocking statement reflects what oppressive suffering can do to people. Such declarations are not positive statements about death but reflect the reality that suffering under an evil system can be so terrible that death is a welcome relief. Seow says, "The point is that the living still have to witness [and perhaps suffer from] the injustices of life, whereas the dead . . . no longer have to do so." The person who has never been born escapes all the suffering and misery that is often a part of life. On the other hand, she or he also misses all of life's pleasures and opportunities.

Job once thought the same thing about himself. After he lost his children, he said, May the day perish on which I was born,  And the night in which it was said, "A male child is conceived ." . . . Why did I not die at birth?  Why did I not perish when I came from the womb? —JOB 3:3, 11

In a world that seems so out of control, where bad things happen to you and those you love while reward falls on those who deserve the opposite, it's hard to believe that God is sovereign.

How could the one who declares himself to be perfect, wise, good, and loving in every way also be in absolute control of the universe and let all of this happen on his watch?

Much of our regular anxiety, worry, fear, and discouragement results from thinking that when things are out of our control, they are out of control completely. But the Bible tells us that if we want to properly understand what is happening around us, we need to remember what's happening above us.

                  BUT WHEN IT GETS PERSONAL THEORY DOESN'T CONSOLE

16 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

God will get them! Were all going to die anyway!

THE FAILURE OF JOB'S COMFORTERS       THEODICIES

• "Free Will" Theodicy

Keller "God has a free will yet is not capable of doing wrong—why could not other beings also be likewise constituted? Also biblical authors teach us that eventually God will give us a suffering-free, evil-free world filled with redeemed human beings. Suffering and death will be banished forever. That means we will be in God's world but not be capable of choosing evil. Yet we will obviously still be capable of love.

Finally, many Christian theologians point out the biblical teaching on the nature of freedom differs sharply from modern views. The Bible characterizes all sin as slavery, never as freedom. Only when we are completely redeemed from all sin will we experience complete freedom (cf. Rom 8:21). We are free only to the extent that we do what God built us to do—to serve him. Therefore, the more capable you are to commit evil, the less free you are. Not until we attain heaven and lose the capability of evil are we truly and completely free. How, then, could the ability to sin be a form of freedom?

The theodicy assumes that if God gives us the gift of free will, then he cannot control the outcomes of its usage. , Jesus' crucifixion was clearly foreordained and destined to happen, and yet all the people who, by God's plan, brought it about were still making their choices freely and thus were responsible for what they did (cf. Acts 2:23). This indicates that it is possible to be free and nevertheless to have our course directed by God—at the same time, compatibly. There are scores of other examples of this. So God can give free will and still direct the outcomes of our choices to fit into his plan for history

• The Finite God theodicy God is good but not powerful
• The Best of all possible worlds theodicy,
• The Original Sin theodicy.
• The Ultimate Harmony theodicy 

Keller "Taken all together, the various theodicies can account for a great deal of human suffering—each theodicy provides some plausible explanations for some of the evil in the world—but they always fall short, in the end, of explaining all suffering. It is very hard to insist that any of them show convincingly how God would be fully justified in permitting all the evil we see in the world. Peter van Inwagen writes that no major Christian church, denomination, or tradition has ever endorsed a particular theodicy. Alvin Plantinga himself wrote: "I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous." And we can add to these warnings the book of Job itself. Surely one of the messages, as we will see, is that it is both futile and inappropriate to assume that any human mind could comprehend all the reasons God might have for any instance of pain and sorrow, let alone for all evil. It may be that the Bible itself warns us not to try to construct these theories."

LEARN CONTENTMENT IN THE WISDOM AND POWER OF GOD

If God has good reasons for allowing suffering and evil, then there is no contradiction between his existence and that of evil. So in order for his case not to fail, the skeptic would have to reply that God could not possibly have any such reasons. But it is very hard to prove that.

"If God is infinitely powerful as you say—why doesn't he stop evil?" But a God who is infinitely more powerful than us would also be infinitely more knowledgeable than us. So the rejoinder to the skeptic is "If God is infinitely knowledgeable—why couldn't he have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil that you can't think of?" To insist that we know as much about life and history as all-powerful God is a logical fallacy, howsoever much the immanent frame of our culture would incline us to feel that way. And we also now can see why Charles Taylor is right, that the "problem of evil" was not widely perceived to be an objection to God until modern times. Human beings operating within the immanent frame have far more confidence in their reasoning powers and their ability to unlock the mysteries of the universe than did ancient people. The belief—that because we cannot think of something, God cannot think of it either—is more than a fallacy. It is a mark of great pride and faith in one's own mind.

As in the book of Job, Solomon comes back to the Sovereignty of God. Like Job, we may not be able to trace God's hands and purposes in the personal crucible of pain inflicted by others, but we can know that God in His Sovereignty is behind it.

James Russell Lowell  Truth forever on the scaffold  Wrong forever on the throne

Yet that scaffold sways the future   And beyond the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadows  Keeping watch above His own.

William Wadsworth Longfellow elaborated on Lowell's original sentiment, saying:

Though the mills of God grind slowly  Yet they grind exceedingly small,
Though with patience He stands waiting   With exactness He grinds all.

This is my father's world,       And though the wrong seem oft so strong God is the ruler yet.

For years, C S Lewis rejected the existence of God because he believed the logical argument from evil against God worked. But eventually, he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it. Lewis describes his awakening to this point in Mere Christianity. Lewis explains that "there is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life." So the existence of cruelty and evil in the world was the reason Lewis could not believe there was a good God, a "moral purpose" operating behind the universe.  But then he began to realize that evil in the world was "precisely the ground which we cannot use" to object to God. Why? "Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot . . . condemn the universe for exhibiting them. . . . Unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid." Here was the conundrum for Lewis as an atheist. His objection to the existence of God was that he could perceive no moral standard behind the world—the world was just randomly evil and cruel. But then, if there was no God, my definition of evil was just based on a private feeling of mine. So Lewis wrote: "In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it." And he concluded with a vivid idea: "The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still."

So this leaves us with a question. What if evil and suffering in the world actually make the existence of God more likely? What if our awareness of absolute evil is a clue that we know unavoidably at some level within ourselves that God actually does exist? Alvin Plantinga writes that a secular way of looking at the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness ( . . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God]."

LEAN ON COMPANIONS

Stabilizing One Another 9,10 : "For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is a lone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!"  you need a friend when times are tough. "But woe to him who is a tone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!" Solomon says you are doomed if you are alone when you fall and have no one to pick you up.  CHARLES SWINDOLL :" Friend ships must be cultivated. They don 't automatically occur when calamity strikes. And I have never heard of a rent-a-friend business either."  You cannot be determined to walk alone and expect everyone to be running toward you when you fall. Cultivate friendships now, while you are still on your feet.

Supporting One Another  11 Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; But how can one be warm alone? you can accomplish more when you work together with others. ALEX HALEY, had a picture in his office of a turtle sitting on a fence. When someone would ask him about it, he would explain that if you ever see a turtle sitting on a fence, you know it had some help getting up there.

two are better than one when you go to work.  It's called synergy: parts of the body working together to accomplish human goals no individual part could accomplish by itself. And he applied that lesson to the Church, the Body of Christ. Each Christian is given gifts by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:11) in order to build up the Body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12).

Paul Simon gave a song in 1969 in the time of the Vietnam War when everything was disturbing and distressing. "When you're down and out, when you're on the street, When evening falls so hard, I will comfort you, I'll take your part. Oh when darkness comes and pain is all around, Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down."    In times of stress, find an eternal companion, find your earthly companions. Remember to be there for them to. That's mutual friendship and support.

Strengthening One Another 12 Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken. "A friend is someone who will walk into your house when the whole world has just walked out."  The highest honour in the Church is not government but service.   John Calvin

Sharpened by One Another  And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.   There is the necessity of helping the other stand up to the stress, that we all might hold together. Prov 27:17 As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. 

Stimulating One Another Heb 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, 25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

Heb 3:12 Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; 13 but exhort one another daily, while it is called "Today," lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

THERE ARE SOME REASONS GOD IS NOT STOPPING INJUSTICE TODAY.

1. We live in a fallen world.  Romans 8: 18-23

2. God sometimes allows injustice to produce a greater good in our life.  Psalm 73  James 1:2-4

3. God sometimes allows injustice to show us that we need a Saviour.

The Cruelty of Corruption can instill humility in us

The Cruelty of Corruption can instill eternity in us

4. God allows injustice only for a season.

 Romans 12:19 "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is Mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord."