Episode Transcript
Proverbs chapter 15 verse 3.
The title of the message tonight is ever beholding.
Our proverb tonight is different than the genre of proverbs that we've been accustomed to seeing, because this proverb is more theological than it is practical.
So unlike most proverbs, it's predominantly teaching a divine attribute of God. and then secondarily teaching a practical life lesson.
And there are four truths about God that I would like to point out to you in this proverb tonight.
If you're taking notes, the first truth that we'll be looking at is the eyes.
God knows.
The eyes.
God knows.
Proverbs 15:3 begins with the eyes.
And so when we're thinking of the eyes, Of course, we have to understand that these are attributes that are credited to God in the Bible, which are attributes of man.
God doesn't have a retina like us, an iris, an eyeball.
He doesn't have physical eyes like us.
We know that because the Bible says so.
He says, the Bible says, darkness and light are the same to you.
Well, that being the case, we know he doesn't work off the same principle as having a pupil, letting eye light in, and things like that.
God doesn't see in that fashion.
So, when we're looking at the word eyes here for God, We can't think of it as eyes in our sense.
But he uses that word so that we can relate, take what we know about eyes.
And then apply that to God, as Brother Shepard so graciously pointed out, in the superlative, isn't that right, Brother Shepard?
In the superlative.
If you don't know what that is, then listen to Sunday school or go back to English class in high school.
But the presence of eyes in Scripture.
It indicates the awareness in the ability of one to think.
The presence of eyes in scripture indicates awareness.
In the ability of one to think.
How many of y'all think of all the plant species you've ever seen?
I've seen a bunch of them.
I like plants.
How many of y'all have ever seen a plant with eyes?
Anybody?
Nobody.
Nobody's ever walked outside and saw a plant staring back at them.
Just doesn't happen.
Plants don't have eyes.
Do you know why plants don't have eyes?
Because they can't think.
That's why.
Plants don't have eyes because they can't think.
When you look at this word eyes in the Hebrew and you start studying it out, it has the insinuation of thought.
Of consciousness.
We see eyes on bugs, animals, and of course people.
Why?
Every one of those creatures can think.
Isn't that amazing?
So when you're thinking about the eyes here.
Understand the principle of awareness, consciousness, thought.
Because the presence of the eyes implies the ability of us to be aware and to think.
If someone can see you, then they know you're there.
You can't separate that.
If they can see you, then they know you're there.
So the presence of eyes is synonymous with the presence of knowledge.
Judges 17, verse 6.
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
There's that word eyes again.
But even here, it's not talking about physical eyes, is it?
We're talking about the eyes of the soul, the consciousness, the awareness.
So, whatever he thought in his mind, whatever man thought in his mind, whatever seemed right to him, whether he could physically see or not, that's what he did.
But you see here how eyes in scripture is synonymous with thought and judgment, right?
He did that which was right in his own eyes.
In other words, how he saw things A lot of times, when we're judging between one thing and another, we're saying, well, I think this about this, or I don't like this, or this is my opinion on this.
We'd say, this is the way I see it, right?
Even though we're not using physical eyes, all of this is very much inferred here in the scripture.
And not just in this proverb, but elsewhere in scriptures, I just pointed out to you.
So, with all that in mind, Solomon wants to talk to us tonight about the eyes, look back in your text, of the Lord.
The Lord has eyes, which in and of itself bears a wonderful truth about God, namely this: God knows.
God knows.
And the difficult things that we go through in life, and we go through a lot of them.
The thing that should comfort us the most, and I'll tell you the thing that has comforted me the most, has been this.
God knows all about it.
That's what I think of when I, well, the Lord knows, God knows, God knows, and all the injustices that we suffer, and all the injustices that we see taking place in life.
Sometimes people do us wrong and we may not even know who that person was.
We come home or we go out to her car.
We find something stolen out of her car, something stolen from her house.
Someone's done us wrong.
We don't know who it is.
We know we may never see justice on earth, but God knows all about it.
And we take comfort in the fact that he does.
Nothing takes God by surprise.
Why?
He has eyes.
Tribulation sneaks up on us, doesn't it?
Everything's fine.
You get a phone call.
What?
No.
God never does that.
It never happens with God.
He knows it before it happens.
He knows all about it while it's happening.
He knows what's going to be the outcome in the very end.
Tribulation never sneaks up on God.
God knows all about it.
And if God knows all about it, then I know.
That He will sustain me by His grace through every trial that I face.
And nothing will overcome me, and nothing will come my way without it being in God's divine will for my life.
Again, God doesn't have physical eyes.
We're talking about the metaphor of God seeing what's going on to assure us that God knows what's going on.
And he knows what's going on, the Bible says, in every place.
For Solomon says, the eyes of the Lord, look back in your text, are in every place.
Every place.
Are the eyes of the Lord under this pulpit?
Yes.
Are the eyes of the Lord outside on the roof?
In the fellowship hall where no one's at right now, well, we think there's no one in there.
If there is, God knows.
The eyes of Lord are everywhere.
What about your shirt pocket, Brother Richard?
The eyes of the Lord are there.
They're everywhere.
You know what the Bible says?
You know what God says about Himself?
Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord.
God fills heaven and earth.
There is no place where God's knowledge is not saturated.
He created everything.
He knows everything.
Nothing escapes the all-knowing, all-seeing eyes of the Lord.
They're not like our eyes.
God sees us when and where nobody else can see us.
Even in our mother's womb, the Bible says God sees us.
Well, you're talking about sonogram.
God was seeing babies long before Sonogram.
Psalm 139, verse 16 says, Speaking to God, thine eyes, here we are speaking about God's eyes again.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect.
So when the psalmist was being formed in his mother's womb, God saw that imperfected child from the moment of conception.
And through the entire stage of the compilation of that child's body, he says, Thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect, and in thy book All my members, talking about the members of his body, were written, which in continuance.
Were fashioned, that means progressively over the nine months, when as yet there was none of them from the moment of conception.
God saw, God knew, and God knew what was going to be and how that little baby was going to be in the very end.
God even sees our thoughts.
Thoughts aren't material, are they?
We're material.
The substance of a child in a mother's womb is material.
Thoughts aren't material.
You can't touch them.
You can't lay hold of them.
You can't catch them in a jar.
You can't put them in a lab and run some kind of chemical analysis on it.
Oh, I know there's electricity go back and forth in the brain and all that, but thoughts aren't material.
God can see everything that we're thinking in our heart.
Everything we ponder, every daydream that we have, God sees it.
1 Samuel 16, verse 7.
But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance or on the height of his stature.
Now that's what man sees.
That's what man can look at.
Man has material eyes.
He can see material things.
So God says, Don't look at his countenance or the height of his stature, because I have refused him, for the Lord seeth.
And here's the key, not as man seeth.
God doesn't have material eyes, He doesn't see the things the way we do.
He said, for man looketh on the outward appearance, and you know what?
That's all man can look on is the outward appearance.
Even if you cut someone open and have surgery on them, the inside is now out.
And that's all man can see.
He can't look at the inner man.
See, this is our outward man.
Our body is our outward man.
If you were to dig all the way down to the center of my body, down to my heart.
Open up my ventricles, you're still looking at the outward man.
But God not only sees the outward, He sees the inner man too.
That's why He said.
He said, Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
How about our thoughts?
So when I say God knows all about it, He really knows all about it.
For the eyes of the Lord are in every place.
And we're going to come back to that portion of scripture here in just a moment.
But for now, We're going to move on to the second great truth about God in this passage, number one: eyes.
God knows.
Number two, beholding.
God cares.
Beholding.
God cares.
Solomon says, The eyes of the Lord are in every place.
Now watch.
God's eyes are never idle.
Another theological truth about God.
God not only has eyes, not material eyes, but He has knowledge.
They're in every place.
He has all knowledge.
He's all-knowing.
But God's eyes are never idle.
If we get tired, sometimes we'll say, I'm going to go rest in my eyes.
And we close our eyelids and we give our eyes a break.
God's eyes are never idle.
At every time, in every place, God's eyes are beholding.
In the Hebrew word that's translated beholding here, it literally means to lean forward and peer into the distance like this.
That's literally what that word means, beholding, not just looking.
I can look at you, but it means to lean forward And peer into the distance.
Why do I say beholding God cares?
Well, if we were at a A sporting event, or if we were watching something unfold in a restaurant, some type of civil activity unfold in a restaurant.
And we were the audience, if we were intently engrossed on what was going on, would we be kicked back like this?
Now, we say the audience was what?
On the edge of their seat.
Now, you see how we understand that?
That they would be like this, leaning forward.
You watch them in the football game, they're going to be leaning forward like this.
And so that's The concept that it has here of God.
The eyes of the Lord are in every place, and God is leaning forward on the edge of his seat intently.
Aggressively looking at what's going on.
Do you know what that means?
God cares about you.
God is interested in every detail of your life.
Sometimes when we try to talk to people and we try to share, I don't know if this has ever happened to y'all before or not.
I remember one time.
I went up to Dallas and I went into auto theft.
Excuse me.
And when I moved to Dallas, The biggest, most pressing thing in my life at that time was to find a church for my family.
I thought I've got to find a church.
It was heavy on my heart.
I spent so much many hours going through phone books, yellow pages, making phone calls, visiting churches, everything.
Well, when I first moved up there.
There was this man.
He was a salesman.
He was trying to sell me something.
And, well, he told me that he was a Christian and all this stuff.
When he told me that, I thought, Well, I'm just going to, I'm up here by myself.
I was up here by myself.
My wife was expecting a child.
And couldn't make the move, and I'm up there all by myself.
And I thought, I'm going to just share this burden.
On my heart for finding a church and how important it is with this other brother in Christ that I just met, this salesman.
And as soon as I start trying to share that burden, I mean, I probably hadn't gotten two sentences into it.
I could see his hand reach down to his belt like that.
And he touched his pager back when we had pagers.
You ever seen a pager?
Yeah, they're in the museum now up in Dallas.
His hand just slowly reached down like a cat and touched his pager.
He goes, Oh, gotta go.
I thought he just touched his pager, made it went off.
And I thought, he doesn't care.
People, a lot of times, you'll lose them if you start going into the details of your life.
Some people are better at talking than they are listening.
God is on the edge of his seat with every detail of your life.
He is on the edge of his seat.
With the detail of every person's life that he created, the goings-on of his creation, God is very much interested in.
So the eyes of the Lord are in every place, and he is watching you with great eagerness of heart.
Because God cares about what happens in your life.
God cares about my life, Brother Richard.
Yes, your life.
His eyes are in every place.
That means they're on every person.
Beholding.
God is leaning forward and He is peering into the distance.
Where you are Does Jesus care when my heart is pained too deeply for mirth and song?
As the burdens press and the cares distress, And the way grows weary and long.
Oh yes, he cares I know he cares, His heart is touched with my grief.
When the days are weary, the long nights dreary, I know my Saviour cares.
Ayes, God knows Beholding, God cares.
Now, the next truth about God: the evil and the good, God judges.
God judges.
Solomon says, God's eyes are beholding, look back in your text, the evil and the good.
God beholds the evil and the good because we, on account of Adam, know good and evil.
Isn't that amazing?
The only reason God's eyes in every place beholding the evil and the good is because we chose to know good and evil.
If it wouldn't have been for Adam eating from that tree, It could not be said that the eyes of the Lord were in every place beholding the evil and the good, because there would have been one place where there wasn't good and evil to behold.
And that had been right here on good old Mother Earth.
Been right here in the solar system.
Our outer space, everything that was given to man.
It wouldn't have been any evil or good to behold.
It'd just been good.
But because of our decision, this is what God beholds.
And so, when you're talking about evil and good, you have to understand that God judges between the two.
How do we know that, Brother Richard?
How do you know that this is insinuating God's judgment?
Well, very simple.
To be able to know and see the evil and the good, God has to know what's good and what's evil.
And the only way to not get it all mixed up together is to judge between the two, you see.
Otherwise, the Bible would have said the eyes of the Lord are in every place beholding stuff, just beholding.
But no, beholding the evil. and the good.
God is constantly looking and judging and aware of everything that is good and everything that is bad on this earth.
And in our lives, all the goings on, God leans forward with great interest.
And he beholds the evil.
Man, I tell you what, I have never seen evil at the levels it's at right now in America.
It's evil.
I was talking to some people at work today.
I don't know how much y'all keep up with the politics and everything, but you know, in the past, we fought wars.
To combat communism.
Now people are electing communists.
They're choosing Communist leaders.
Now they're fools.
They're foolish people.
They don't, they, they, I don't think they can possibly understand.
Grasp what's really going on when they make those choices, unless they're in the upper echelon of the party and they have a lust for power.
But the people down here They don't understand what's going on.
All they hear is, you mean these people are rich and you can take their wealth and you can give it to me?
See, in their mind, they think there's a certain amount of wealth in the world.
And they think, well, no one should have this much wealth.
If we have, so if we take that wealth and we spread it to everybody evenly, we'll all be wealthy.
It doesn't work that way, does it, Hannah?
It doesn't work that way.
I could go into an economic lesson, I could explain to you why it doesn't work, and I would do it very eloquently.
You'd be amazed.
But that would be very much sidetracked from where we are.
But it's evil.
There is an agenda right now from the Islamic people, and they want to take this nation over.
And if they ever get control, they'll be persecuting us Christians and doing everything Jesus said they would do.
They'll be taking off heads and giving praise to Allah for all of it.
Jesus said there's going to come a day When to persecute you, they will believe they'll be doing God's service.
That's what we're up against, the very things that Jesus warned us about.
And God leans forward with great interest.
He beholds the evil.
Do you know, did you know, used to, years ago, there was a mass shooting at UT Austin.
Men climbed up on top of a bell tower and started shooting down on people.
They made a movie about it.
Then there was one at Luby's, remember that?
Some of y'all weren't born yet.
A guy we worked with, Bill Cooper, he went in there and he actually had to confront the government and everything.
That was a big deal.
And then the mass shootings got more.
And you know what they always said?
What was the motive?
Do you realize, I noticed the other day, there's so many now we don't even ask what the motive is anymore, do we?
We don't even say, did you hear about the shooting?
You would say, well, which one?
And God is watching all of this.
He's taking note of all of it.
And it gives me great comfort of heart.
To know that he's not going to let this go on forever.
There's going to be a time.
When Jesus puts it this way, he says that if those days were not shortened, meaning if God didn't finally come down and just say, enough.
That'd be the end.
There wouldn't be any of us left.
But God's watching.
And God one day is going to say, Enough, enough.
He beholds all the bad that we do, too.
So we can rest assured that God is going to judge between good and evil in our lives.
In other people's lives, everything going on in this world, every evil thing done, will be brought into account one day.
And justice will be fully served.
And I'm looking forward to it.
Don't get me wrong, I want people to repent.
I want people to be saved, but there's some folks that aren't going to.
And I'm very much looking forward to a time of righteous judgment.
This should also not only warn us that we have to give an account to God for the evil things that we do.
Thank God we won't be condemned for them because of Jesus.
That we will suffer a loss or gain of rewards, the Bible explains.
But not only should it warn us And comfort us of the judgment to come.
It should also serve as a comfort to us that not only does God behold all the evil, but it says He beholds the evil and the good.
The earthy eyes of man miss a lot of good.
There's a lot of things that we do we never get credit for.
Do we never get praised for?
But you know what?
If nobody sees what you do for the Lord, God does.
He beholds the good as well.
And the same God who justly and also mercifully chastises his people.
He also graciously rewards them too.
Matthew chapter 6, verse 6.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet.
And when thou hast shut the door, so here's someone in their closet or in the little room, they have the door shut.
He says, Pray to thy Father, which is in secret.
You pray to God in secret.
And thy father, here we are, the eyes of the Lord, which seeth in secret.
So the eyes of the Lord they see in secret places, they see secret thoughts.
They behold secret words in the eyes of the Lord, which sees those good things in secret.
The Bible says, shall reward thee openly.
And God could not reward you openly for your good if he wasn't leaning forward and eagerly beholding it.
You see?
The eyes of the Lord are in every place, even in your prayer closet, beholding the good.
God cares about your life.
Jesus said the very number of the hairs on your head are known to God.
And if he keeps track of the number of hairs on your head, and boy, I tell you what, for midlifers and older people, that's a lot of calculating God has to do.
Every time you go to the shower, right?
You leave a big old trail behind, you know.
But if he keeps track of the very number of the hairs of your head, he'll never forget your labor of love for him.
Not even the smallest thing.
That's why Jesus said, not even a cup of water given in his name will be without reward.
Do you know what that little cup of water is?
It's not much.
It's like a hair on your head.
It's the small things that God sees.
It's the small things that God won't forget, and you'll even get a reward for that.
Now, lastly, we're going to go back to our last thing, and then we'll close.
First, eyes, God knows.
Second, beholding, God cares.
Third, the evil and the good, God judges.
And fourth, we're going to go back to where I told you we'd go back to earlier, the phrase in every place, God fully restores.
God fully restores.
God knows the eyes.
God cares beholding.
God judges the evil and the good in every place.
God fully restores.
Because the eyes of the Lord are in every place, and they're beholding the evil and the good, and God is judging the evil and the good and will In the end, judge the evil and the good righteously, we can rest assured that every place God's eyes are in, everything God sees.
We can rest assured that every wrong will be made right and every broken heart of God's people will be mended, every one.
Every little crack, every little problem.
If you were to travel to Rome today, I went to work the other day, went to my office, and There on my computer screen was the Roman Coliseum.
You know how it'll put up on your screen saver or lock screen?
It'll put up. different photos sometimes.
And there's the Roman Colosseum up there.
It's beautiful.
The ruins of that Roman Colosseum.
And I just stared at it for a while.
And I thought, wonder what all went on in there.
Some things I think I know.
I just looked at it.
What did it look like when it was, you know, before it fell and started becoming a ruin?
If you were to travel to Rome, you'd see the remnant of that country's former days.
But when God is finished with this broken world, God's grace of the cross of Jesus Christ is going to be every place where his eyes are.
You understand that?
In Isaiah 53, the Bible says of God, speaking of Jesus, he shall see.
Of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied by his knowledge, seeing and knowing, right?
Seeing and knowledge.
By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities.
God shall see the travail of Jesus' soul.
The eyes of the Lord are in every place, and in every place that God's eyes are, he is going to mercifully, mightily, with great righteous judgment, apply.
The power of the cross in each and every place.
God fills heaven and earth.
God sees heaven and earth.
God judges heaven and earth.
And in every place, that judgment will be applied.
There'll be no space anywhere in heaven and earth that the cross of Jesus Christ Does not reach.
Why?
Because the eyes of the Lord are in every place.
So when God is finished with this broken world, it won't be like Rome.
There will be nothing left to remind us of our sad and infamous past.
No coliseums, no remnants.
No signs of any sin that's ever breached God's creation.
God sees all things.
Therefore, all things will be made new.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
Thank you for your holy eyes.
Thank you that they reach every place and there will be no place Left unattended by the cross.
We thank you in Jesus' precious name and we rest confidently in the great truths we learn tonight.
Amen.
