Boy am I cutting it close here.

I just got home from seeing the movie 21 with some friends. The movie was good in its own right, I was well entertained. A good friend saw it a few weeks back and said it made him think of the book of Ecclesiastes; he was right to draw that out of it. The main character rides a roller coaster of prosperity, but ultimately doesn’t find any true satisfaction in it. Leaving the movie, it made this quotation from Thomas Brooks seem insightful:

“No man knows the heart of God stands toward him by His hand. His hand of mercy may be toward a man when His heart may be against that man, as you see in the case of Saul and others. And the hand of God may be set against a man when the heart of God is dearly set upon him, as you may see in Job and Ephraim. No man knows either love or hatred by outward mercy or misery; for all things come alike to all, to the righteous and the unrighteous, to the good and to the bad, to the clean and to the unclean. The sun of prosperity shines as well upon brambles of the wilderness, as fruit-trees of the orchard; the snow and hail of adversity light upon the best garden, as well as upon the stinking dunghill or the wild waste. Ahab’s and Josiah’s ends concur in the very circumstances. Saul and Jonathan, though different in their natures, deserts, and deportments, yet in their deaths they were not divided. Health, wealth, honours, crosses, sicknesses, losses are cast upon good men and bad men promiscuously. “The whole Turkish empire” says Luther, “is nothing else but a crust cast by Heaven’s great housekeeper to His dogs”. Moses dies in the wilderness as well as those that murmured. Nabal is rich as well as Abraham; Ahithopehel wise as well as Solomon, and Doeg is honoured as well as Saul, as well as Joseph and Pharaoh.”

Take that prosperity gospel.

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