Crookedness

Solomon says, 'What is crooked cannot be made straight,' a truism that most people know to be the case. Harsh words cannot be unsaid. Wicked deeds cannot be undone.

Ecclesiastes is full of frustration, bluntness, and even a little hopeless. However, its themes are realistic and necessary for us to grasp.

John Ritenbaugh reiterates that the book of Ecclesiastes, a document which provides an overview of the consequences of life's frustrating activities, gives us directions for making it through the labyrinth of life. This treatise prepares us with helpful, p. . .

Love for this world will inevitably bring disillusionment. Because the world is passing away, our priorities should be to fear God and keep his commandments.

John Ritenbaugh explores the different nuances of this huge, sprawling negative concept, ranging from transitoriness, futility, profitlessness, confusion, falseness, conceit, vainglory, denial, and idolatry. Moses encapsulates the Old Testament's understan. . .

John Ritenbaugh explores the negative symbolism of wine (as representing intoxication and addiction) in Revelation17 and 18. The entire Babylonian system (highly appealing to carnal human nature) has an enslaving addicting, and inebriating quality, produci. . .

John Ritenbaugh focuses upon vision - an especially vivid picture in the mind's eye (undergirded by faith, scriptural revelation, and prompted by God's Holy Spirit) to anticipate and plan for events and results which have not yet occurred. This foresight o. . .

John Ritenbaugh reiterates that even before we acquire the necessary motivational building blocks of faith, hope, and love, we must acquire the fear of God (spanning the emotions of stark terror to reverential awe) providing a key, unlocking the treasures . . .

Hard trials are not punishments from God for unrighteousness but tests of faith in which He is intimately involved to prepare us for the world to come.

Having shown that God is involved in world affairs, John Ritenbaugh concludes by showing that God's hand was definitely involved in the scattering of the church. Our reaction needs to be positive: that, if He felt it needed to be done, we should respond by. . .

Trials are a means to produce spiritual growth, unless we resort to super-righteousness, straining to please God by exalting our works.

In His profound compassion, Jesus healed a severely deformed women, bent nearly double, of this infirmity that had plagued her for eighteen years.

When Jesus healed a woman bent over by a severe spinal condition, it was in a synagogue and on a Sabbath, arousing the anger of the Pharisees.

Using the lesson of the Tower of Babel and the Babylonic system, John Ritenbaugh asserts that mankind must stop trusting in its towers—anything that we place our trust in apart from Almighty God (wealth, status, achievement, military prowess, scienti. . .