And if you would, please take up your copy of God's Word again and turn once more to the book of Ecclesiastes, the 7th chapter. Ecclesiastes chapter 7, and we take up the reading at verse 23, that's where we left off, we left off at verse 22 prior. Here, once again, God's Word. All this I have proved by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. And as for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? I applied my heart to know, to search and to seek out wisdom and the reason of things to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her." And here's what I found, says the preacher, adding one thing to another, or to the other, to find out the reason. which my soul still seeks, but I cannot find. One man among a thousand I have found, but a woman among all these I have not found. Truly, this only I have found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. Giving our attention to the first two or three verses, the preacher says, All this I have proved by wisdom. And I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. As for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? I applied my heart to know, to search and to seek out wisdom and reason of things, to know of the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. And so in his journey to seek and to apply wisdom, he comes now to a point in which he will admit his limitations. In essence, he basically says that by wisdom he learned that wisdom had escaped him. By wisdom he learned that wisdom had escaped him. It was through his application of wisdom that he learned wisdom had escaped him. Now talk about a paradox, or a seeming paradox, but it's really not anything unlike that familiar cry in the Gospels in which we hear the man crying out to the Lord, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief. As one man put it, it takes faith to see how weak one's faith is. Indeed, when it comes to wisdom, the more you know, the more you realize how much you really don't know. Solomon mentioned that there are times when he noticed those who are wicked living longer than those who are righteous. And we might come up with equally difficult examples in our own day that make us equally uncomfortable as the people of God. But at the end of the day, every one of us must admit and acknowledge that we don't know all things. That we're limited in our wisdom, limited in our knowledge. Like Job, when we consider these things, all we can do really is to place our hands over our mouths and just be quiet. Because we don't know all the reasons, we don't know all the factors and all the details the Lord has considered in His perfect plan that He is carrying out in this world. Isaiah 55, verse 9, we're reminded that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts, says the Lord. Psalm 139, verse 6, says, such knowledge, speaking of God's knowledge, such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Then of course, Paul exclaims in a bout of worship in Romans 11, 33, Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. Charles Bridges said, our highest knowledge is but a mere atom when compared with the unsearchable extent of our ignorance. The more we know God, the more we know of God, his nature, his works, his dispensations, the more we are humbled in the sense of our ignorance. At some point, every one of us must face the reality of our limitations when it comes to our knowledge and wisdom, and to be able to rest in the fact that our Lord himself is altogether wise, and to trust what we do know about our Lord and what the scriptures claim with full certainty. And that is that God is working all things together for good, even if I can't comprehend how that is the case. Calvin referred to this sort of thing as learned ignorance. But none of this is to say that we're incapable, altogether incapable, of being wise. Indeed, the Lord tells us plainly in James that anybody who wants wisdom simply just has to ask for it. So when we run into situations when we're way beyond our ability to know or to understand something, we do well to cry out to God, Lord, give me wisdom. Let me know how to look upon this thing. Let me know how to react to this thing. Give me the insight that I need to be right as I deal with this matter. Let me take a step backwards here. Asking the Lord for wisdom. One of the very practical and dangerous areas in which we need to seek and apply wisdom. This is again another instance in which we take this high lofty wisdom that comes from heaven above and God gives it to us and gives us a practical everyday example of how to apply it. He's going to do it here in verse 26 and that's in the arena of sexual folly. Look at verse 26. And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. Of course, this passage in this whole problem of sexual folly applies equally both to male and female alike. But, that said, it would seem it is more common for men to fall into this trap than women. So brothers, here is another ground level bit of application from the wise man Solomon. If anybody had wisdom, to impart to the rest of us guys in this particular area. It would be this man. He learned these things the hard way. But we don't have to. We don't have to. We can learn from the mistakes of others that have gone before us. We don't have to go headlong into these kinds of sins as Solomon himself did. we can learn and take the heart, the wisdom that he imparts to us here, that we might not fall into the snare of this temptation. One man writes that there is a woman who hunts by night, whose trap is pleasantly baited, like a hunter who understands the prey. An immoral woman knows how to get the results she wants. Proverbs 23, verses 27 and 28, for a harlot is a deep pit, and a seductress is a narrow well. She also lies in wait, asks for a victim, and increases the faithful among men. He goes on to say, not that the task is all that hard, No more than trying to hit the ground with your hat. Only the pleasure of God can rescue a man from her. Brothers, most of you already know this to be true, but I will say it anyway. The traps of the harlot are all around you every day. Your smartphone can be a trap. Your TV can be a trap. Your PC at home and at work can be a trap. That woman co-worker can be a trap. The traps are set about us everywhere we go. Left to yourself, you're going to get caught. You're going to fall. A number of you have already been caught. And some of you are currently sitting in her net, even this morning, and are wallowing, even now, in the guilt for your lapse of judgment. This is a terrible place to be as a child of God. But let me also offer a word of encouragement. Remember, we spoke about it in the last sermon, and we'll speak about it in every sermon we're building, the gospel is for sinners. All of us fall short of the glory of God. Every one of us is a sinner against God's law. Every one of us needs forgiveness. And I'm here to share and proclaim to you that there is forgiveness in Christ for you this morning. If you are a brother who is filled with guilt because you've fallen in this woman's trap, or perhaps you even went knocking on her door looking for her, You should know that the Lord is able and willing to forgive you of all your sins right now. All you have to do, it's very simple. Confess your sin. Cry out to him for forgiveness. Take your sin to the cross this morning. Confess it. Nail it to the cross and trust that Jesus will be true to do what he says he will do. And that is to forgive you of your sins. But let me also encourage you brothers to go further than that. Let me encourage you brothers to learn to be wise. Pray for wisdom. Ask the Lord to give you discernment to see where the traps have been set. As I said, your phone might be a trap. Your TV, your PC might be a trap. Your mail might be a trap. But knowing that there are so many ways for her to set her net, we do well to look to find some sense of accountability in our lives. That's the way of wisdom. The way of wisdom is to say, cry out to God for help, and also pay attention to what help God has already provided for you, in that you are a member of the Church and Body of Christ. There are others to help you. We are supposed to be here for one another. Find some sense of accountability. Perhaps you would do well to put an accountability program on your phone and on your PC. Perhaps you can make a point only to watch TV when others are around. Maybe you ought to be ready at any time for your spouse to be able to take your phone from you in order to look and see what's on your phone. But she shouldn't have to ask you to do that. She should have a right to these sorts of things. Brothers, this area of sin, I think you know this, is no joke. I think we would be shocked. We would be shocked to learn how many, even in this assembly, have fallen in the past, and how many are currently in bondage right now to this sin. We need to be wise in how we live. We need to be wise enough to know that the Lord always provides a way of escape when we're tempted, and that all we have to do is stop and look for it. It's there. The way of escape is there. He promises that in 1 Corinthians 10, 13. The way of escape is there. Solomon tells us that the man who pleases God will escape from her. So there is a way of escape. Remember Joseph, how he found the way of escape when he was tempted by Potiphar's wife. He ran from her. That was the way of escape. The way of escape was out the door. There's always a way of escape. Well next, Solomon brings up yet another observation and conclusion which also happens to involve women in verses 27 and 28. It says, Here is what I have found, says the preacher, adding one thing to the other to find out the reason which my soul still seeks but I cannot find. One man among a thousand I have found, but a woman among all these I have not found. Now some will see these words and they'll just as quickly dismiss them as remarks of a chauvinistic man living during a time when having a low view of women was common and acceptable. And that how now that we are a more mature race of people, more learned people, this sort of thing ought to be brushed off as outdated and we ought to just move on, not spend any time on it. Well, first of all, let us recognize that no Christian should ever treat the Word of God in a way like that. And secondly, we do well to remember the context in which Solomon was writing. You remember that Solomon is the one who wrote this. And he's writing about what he has found personally in his search for wise people among those who were around him. So in looking over the men who were around him, he says he could find only one man in a thousand who was wise. And then when looking at the women who were around him, he says he found none. Now before we make hasty accusations against the wise man, let's remember what kind of women he surrounded himself with. King Solomon had a thousand wise and concubines in his royal harem. These were unbelieving women. They were unbelieving women who worshipped false gods and caused Solomon to worship them too. So should we be shocked to learn that none of his wives were wise, when in fact none of them feared the Lord? That's what wisdom is, to know the fear of the Lord. His wives didn't know the fear of the Lord, they worshipped false gods. Now it's difficult to believe that Solomon intends his comment to be a sweeping generalization of all women across the board, especially given the fact that he would have been familiar with such godly women as Deborah and Sarah and Hannah and his own great-grandmother Ruth. So his point isn't that women lack more wisdom than men. It's obvious, too, that his point is not that men have it all over the place. He's telling us that it's really not in existence almost anywhere around him, is his point. What is his point? What is his point, asks one preacher. And to which he answers, his point is is that every member of our sorry race under the sun is an insufferable fool in the eyes of God. And to argue about whether or not women are more foolish than men would be just one more case in point of our folly. Even if there is one wise man in a thousand, chances are you are one of the 999. But the point is that it's not like a lottery drawing in which all you can do is hope that you're the lucky one. The way of wisdom is clear and accessible and all the more needful because of folly's prevalence. Yes, it is open to you women as well as men. It begins with the fear of the Lord. It is a true spirituality rooted in grace, marked by an evident union with Christ, and displayed by living out the wisdom of God's Word. The slim odds of finding wisdom in the world which Kohelet reports are meant to drive us to seek the Savior and His wisdom all the more earnestly. Christ says, Jesus says, strive to enter Many will try but not be able. His point there is not to discourage us, but to encourage us to strive. To strive for it. And so Kohelet uses that same approach. This is very few with godly wisdom in the world, all the more reason to strive to get it where and when it may still be found. Right? Look at verse 29. Truly this only I have found. that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. And here we have all the proof we need to be assured that it really doesn't matter if Solomon came to find that the men whom he knew were one-tenth of one percent more likely to be wise than the women he knew, because he now asserts that all men, women, and children are in the same boat. They are all shut up under sin. Every one of us are all sinners. Every one of us misses the mark, regardless of our gender. So in this verse we have a testimony to the fact that when God created Adam and Eve, He created them upright. Meaning they were perfect when He first created them, male and female. But then, as we know, going back to Genesis chapters 1-3, something happened. Something happened which many people in our world fail to appreciate and fail to accept. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned against the Lord. And in doing so, they brought sin and death into this world in which we live. You see, many people refer or like to prefer to put the blame upon God for all the wrong that goes on in this world. They'd rather blame God for these things rather than to acknowledge the fact that we're the ones to blame for our own troubles. We brought these things upon ourselves. It was through Adam's sin that sin and death came into this world and spread to all men. Read Romans 5. Calvin compared Adam to a root that goes rotten and then ruins the whole tree of the human race. Since the time of the Fall, we, like our fathers, have devised many schemes, meaning we have become quite creative in our ability to sin. Surely the preacher has a purpose for mentioning the fact that man was originally created perfect and that he had fallen from that state of perfection. Surely, Solomon doesn't tell us this with the intention to simply tell us the bad news in order to just provide us with a piece of objective history to tell us the state of our condition with no hope just to describe it as a historical fact. Surely, there's more to his reasoning than that. Indeed, there is hope. There is hope in what he offers to us here. Hope in that he reminds us that God had a glorious purpose in creating us at the beginning. Knowing this, and knowing that God is the Sovereign One who works all things together, we know that His ultimate purpose in creating man cannot and will not be thwarted. His ultimate purpose will stand and it will ultimately come to fruition. Sin, doubt, And all the troubles in life that we face were not the first words about our world. They were not the first words about our existence. And they won't be the last words either. Indeed, since the fall, mankind has followed many schemes of sin. Some of those sins we considered this morning. The sin of being self-righteous. The sin of living lawlessly. Describing the self-righteous. and the ways in which they err, and the lawlessness, and the ways in which the antinomians err. We talked about this morning already the trappings of sexual problems and fault. There are many ways in which men fall. Describing self-righteousness in particular, a man named John Randolph said that the religiously self-righteous, he says, are like a dead mackerel on the beach in the moonlight. They simultaneously shine and stink. It's a good picture of self-righteous. But all of the sin that we see in this world, and in our very own lives for that matter, makes an open and shut case to prove that none of us is able to be wise or righteous enough to restore ourselves to that original state of perfection. Since Adam, since his fall, we are born in this world sinful, with sinful natures. One man describes how messed up we are when he says that our prayers need to be prayed for, our tears need washing, our repentance needs to be repented of. That's how messed up we are as a result of sin. And so then knowing that all of us are shut up under sin because not only did we inherit our sinful nature from our first father Adam, but we also actually commit sins ourselves right now and every day in thought, word, and deed. So knowing that none of us is righteous in and of ourselves drives us in to look for a righteousness outside of ourselves, if we carefully consider this. The one goes with the other. If you yourself can't be righteous enough to earn this state of affection and forgiveness in the eyes of God, or earn the right to be in His presence, then it stands to reason you need to look somewhere else. If it's not to be found in you, and if you're incapable of doing it yourself, you need to look outside of yourself. We need the righteousness of another. And while Solomon doesn't come right out and tell us at least not here in this passage, the Lord has been pleased to provide us with more than Solomon tells us here. And he does it in a glorious way, and we're going to read Romans 3, 21-26, and we're going to conclude with this. So listen to this. Very important for us to understand. But now, the righteousness of God, apart from the law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness. Because in his forbearance, God had passed over the sins that were previously committed to demonstrate, at the present time, his righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. That righteousness that we needed is outside of ourselves. It's found in only one place. It's found in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. You must cling to Him if you have any hope of being accepted in the sight of the Father. Amen.