[Tim Martens] Last week, the theme for the Women's Enrichment Weekend in Springfield, Missouri, was the Proverbs 31 woman. In preparing for speaking for that event, I came across a few verses in Proverbs 30. Those verses reinforce characteristics that are helpful to understand the process of being converted, to be converted to God's way of thinking. So, in Proverbs 30:18-19, there are four activities or happenings that are described as “wonderful.” Well, wonderful is used in the same sense that observing things that causes a person to be in awe, to wonder how such a thing could be.

The title of today's message is “Proverbs 30: The Wonder of God's Calling.” “Proverbs 30: The Wonder of God's Calling.” When my wife and I were married, she insisted that I not go to the Grand Canyon of Arizona without her. So, even though I drove past the Grand Canyon several times, I didn't stop. And years later, we did have the opportunity then to visit the Grand Canyon together. And we stood on the edge and I was in awe of the wondrous sight. She wanted to share that sense of wonderment, that sense of awe.

Many years before I had climbed one of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains called the South Sister, and it was near the city of Bend, not far from where there's a Feast site. And as I stood on that mountaintop, I was in awe that I could view in every direction. You could see other mountaintops, valleys in the distance, in several directions. It's likely that we've all heard or seen some amazing things, things that were new and wondrous to us.

So, let's take a look at Proverbs 30, starting in verse 18. "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I don't understand." Well, this increasing idea of numbers, where you increase, oh, we have this many, and then we have this many. This sensation of increasing numbers from three to then four, the expansion of numbers is a Hebraic method of emphasis, where when it says three, "Well, wait a minute, maybe four."

And notice it says, it doesn't just say wonderful, it says “too wonderful.” It's the next superlative, it's going beyond this, it's really quite something. The King James Version of the Bible translates wonderful by Strong’s in the following manner, calls it “marvelous or wonderful.” In some cases, it's translated as “hard, or wondrously, or marvelously.” And so, it means “to be marvelous, or to be wonderful, to be surpassing, to be extraordinary.” And in some case, it may say “difficult to understand.”

Well, we can think of things that are difficult to understand, you just run a little calculus by me and I could say “That's difficult.” I would say, "Wow, somebody that can do that just like that and derive numbers is really something." So, something that's extraordinary, beyond the ordinary. So, the first thing, in Yiddish, they have a word for that, it's called awestruck verklempt, awestruck, “Wow, I'm just awestruck."

The first of the four things described as wonderful in Proverbs 30 then start in verse 19, and so, this is my first point in Proverbs 30:19. Point one, "The way of an eagle in the air,” so, this is a wondrous thing, it's too wonderful. Well, if you stop and look at the characteristics of an eagle, it really is remarkable. This thing, how can it be when we look at an eagle?

The body of an eagle is made for flying and for catching prey. Now, the word here for eagle could also be used for other kinds of birds of prey that act in the same way as an eagle. To fly and catch prey, the body must be white… or lightweight, but still very strong, it has to be light enough to get off the ground, it has to fly high enough in the air, but strong enough to swoop down on its prey and carry it away.

To make the bodies lighter so they can take off, the bones are hollow. In some places, there are braces, cross braces inside the bones to make them stronger. But many parts of the bones are simply hollow tubes full of air. In fact, the entire skeleton of a bald eagle weighs just a little more than a half a pound even though it looks much, much larger. When an eagle flaps its wings, most of the power for flying comes from the downward stroke of the wing. For this reason, the wings that pull down are much stronger than the wings… or the muscles that lift the wings up. And those are flight muscles are important that the muscles account for about half of an eagle's total weight.

An eagle can fly faster or slower just by changing the position of its wings. When it wants to fly fast, it turns the front of the wings into the wind and it kind of cuts through the air. When the eagle wants to slow down, it turns the wide surface of the wings to the air and that will slow it down because it creates a drag. When an eagle attempts to land, they don't have really much of a second chance, they can't make sloppy landings and crash, particularly if they're landing on the top of a tree or up on a cliff, so they have to be really, really good at landings. So, to slow themselves down for the landing, they spread their wings, put their tail down, and then kind of just drag themselves through the air, and that acts as a brake.

So, this low weight and high strength allows the eagle to do amazing things. They don't have any extra weight on them, everything is designed for flight. Now, they've got a lot of feathers but each feather really doesn't weigh very much. A bald eagle has about 7,000 feathers, but if you put them together, they weigh about 21 ounces in a bald eagle. If you took 30 of these feathers in your hand, of these 7,000 feathers, they would weigh less than one penny.

Well, the wings of the eagles are powerful and they know how to climb in the air without working too hard. And then, they swoop down on the prey and they dive into them, and they can lift heavy prey into the air. Some can even fly away with prey that weighs more than they do.

Now, I know at our place, we've lost some chickens to hawks, who swooped down, where the chicken weighs more than the hawk, and the hawk goes away with the chicken. So, when there's one of those in the neighborhood, you can tell, the rooster is out there strutting in front of them, and the hens are all gathered behind him. And then, we know that there's something around, and we can look in the trees and we can see what that is.

An eagle is able to take advantage of the air currents to help it rise up. And so, when a wind comes up to a hill or a mountain, then the air current flows with it. And so, this eagle is really a miracle in lightweight design. A female bald eagle can have wings that are almost eight feet long, and yet, the wings weigh less than two pounds. And with these feathers overlapping, they'll be able to catch a lot of air.

Now, if you've seen eagles, or hawks, or those kinds of creatures through the air, they can play, they can have fun, you go up there, they can loop around. Probably you wouldn't want to be on an airplane that was doing the same thing. When they swoop through the air, they can go very fast and go up to 200 miles an hour. I know, and one source says, when eagles mate, they fly as high up in the air as they can, and then they fall together more than 1,000 feet during that mating process. So, it's really a remarkable creature that when… it's too wonderful, you know, you wouldn't think it could happen. But all of these things put together are really quite remarkable to make this eagle quite a creature.

Now, the eagle is used symbolically for reliance upon God. In Exodus 19:3-5, and this is the time of year when we often look when the children of Israel came out of Egypt. And they came out of Egypt and here, the eagle is used symbolically for… used as a term as a wonderful rescuer. So, in Exodus 19:3-5, "And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called him from the mountain, saying, 'Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, tell the children of Israel: “You've seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine.”'"

So, we have a reference here to God being like an eagle, a rescuer, and indeed rescued the children of Israel from Egypt through a series of miracles. They had a hard time even imagining how they could get out, they couldn't imagine it, and yet it happened. Just as the eagle is too wonderful, so now, God is using that reference to say, "That's remarkably wonderful. And if you can appreciate that, then you'll be My special treasure, you'll obey My words."

Some of the other references in the Bible to eagle, one that I want to call attention to is in Revelation 12:13-14. And this is an end time prophecy, it actually encompasses a couple of thousand years… or greater than that actually. In Revelation 12, starting in verse 13, "Now when the dragon saw that he'd been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child." This is referring to the birth of Christ, Satan was cast to earth. And now read in verse 14, "But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she's nourished for a time and times and a half a time, from the presence of the serpent."

So, this covers a great deal of history, it covers a time when Satan was cast to the earth, it covers the time of the birth of Christ who is there to give hope to mankind, the salvation of mankind. And then, it talks about this end time when woman, meaning the Church, was given the safety by putting on, by being rescued on the wings of a great eagle into the wilderness, where nourished for a time, times, and half a time, or three and a half years. And we can look into our prophecy and see how that time is coming during the tribulation, where God's people will have a way of protection, God's a rescuer.

So, point one about Proverbs 30:19, what is wondrous or wonderful is the way of an eagle in the air. The second example we're given in Proverbs 30:19 is “the way of a serpent on a rock,” the way of a serpent on a rock.

I did a little research on snakes, really not my favorite subject. I remember going out to the sheep shed one nice, warm July day, sliding open the shed door, it's a metal shed, and the sun shone on it. It was nice and warm on the inside like a convection oven. I slide open the door, up comes this snake that's about the size of my arm and it's about six feet long. And it's curling up to look at me, and I decided that was a good time to close the sheep shed door and walk briskly away and ponder my next move. It didn't move, I mean, it kind of curled up like you would see a snake. And it was kind of a dark one with a diamond black pattern on it, later probably a king snake or rat snake. So, I have a little personal feeling here about this that I could put into this.

So, how do snakes move, because it's wonderful, how do they move on a flat surface, on a rock? Well, I've climbed a little rock climbing, a little bit of mountain climbing at times, and sometimes getting across a flat rock can be difficult when you're in four-wheel drive, and you've got your hands and your feet. How does a snake do it when it's just this long slithery thing?

Well, there's four methods that I've identified, a serpentine method. This is what people think of when they think of a snake. And it will push off of any other bump or a surface on the rock and push themselves from one place to another, kind of going in a wavy motion. But they wouldn't be able to go across a slick surface like glass or something because there's no surface, there's nothing to push against. The technical term is lateral undulation, meaning wavy sideways movement to propel themselves forward. So, that's the serpentine method.

Then, there's the concertina method. This is more difficult for the snake to move but is effective in tight places. It braces the back of its body and it pushes the front forward, you know, then it drops the front portion of the body, and it straightens up and pulls the back up sort of like an inchworm. I'm thinking of the little kids, when we raised little kids, before they really learn how to walk or even crawl, they flip over on their back to their tummy, and when they flip onto their tummy, and then they push with their hind feet till the butt goes up in the air. The hind feet get a good grip, and then they forward slide forward. Then they push up with their hind feet till their butt goes in the air again, then they slide forward. Well, that's the concertina method. If you were, like an accordion, squeezing uptight, and then let it out loose. So, that's one method that they use.

And then, there's one that's called… a snake will do what's called sidewinding. It's a difficult motion to describe but it's used by snakes when they move on loose or slippery surfaces like sand or mud. It's sort of like a snake throws its head forward, and then, the rest of the body has to catch up with the head. So, it kind of flings itself catches up, flings itself, catches up.

And then, the fourth method is what they call the rectilinear method. Now, I'd never heard that word before, so… A rectilinear method is slow creeping, straight movement. And this is where the snake uses some of the scales on its belly to grip, and then it pulls itself forward, and then it grips from other scales. It kind of just, I'm thinking like catch and release on Velcro, you know, it just pulls itself forward and pulling itself forward.

The Bible references the serpent in a number of cases. And you say, "Well, this is… how does a serpent move on a rock?" is the verse in verse 19, and in Genesis 3:1, there's a reference to serpent. Because it's hard to understand, how does a snake get around? It doesn't have any hands, it doesn't have any feet, and yet, it's still able to do things. In Genesis 3:1, "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." That's quite a statement, very cunning. In other words, very clever. You might say they got one up on us, they're trying to figure things out ahead of time for what we're doing, very clever.

And, of course, in the same verse, the serpent says to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?'" And we know the story where the serpent convinces the woman to go ahead and take of the fruit. We go down in Genesis 3:13, "And the Lord God said to the woman, 'What is this you've done?' And the woman said, 'The serpent deceived me, and I ate.'" What we've read here that the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field, and the woman said, "It deceived me." I believe her. It did, no doubt, deceive her, her guard wasn't up.

And so, the Lord said to the serpent, verse 14, "Lord God said to the serpent: 'Because you've done this, you're cursed more than all cattle, of every beast in the field; on your belly you shall go,'" and so forth. And it goes on, in verse 15, "I'll put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel." That's a prophecy to Jesus Christ coming, okay, to displace Satan as the god of this world.

Now, we move ahead to Matthew 7, move ahead to Matthew 7:9. You know, I may not be the only one that gets a little nervous when I see a snake, because generally, I try to go in the other direction. Some people are snake lovers, I have a brother-in-law who enjoys snakes, plays with them at one time, and he thinks they're just fine. I haven't reached that point yet.

In Matthew 7:9, "Which man among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? Now, if you then, being evil," meaning we're all sinners, "know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who's in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Now, I thought it interesting, asks for a fish and give him a serpent. Have you ever seen a serpent or a snake swim in the water? It's really quite remarkable.

Now, as a boy growing up on the farm, we had big livestock tanks. Now, we didn't have fish in them, but when we did catch a snake, we'd throw it in the tank and watch it swim around. And they could climb their way out, but they would stick their heads up and then somehow wiggle their way through the water. Never did figure it out exactly what they did, but they'd have their head out just like the Loch Ness Monster, you know, kind of swimming through the water.

So, if someone asks for a fish, would you give them a serpent, or if they ask for bread, would you give them a stone? About giving good things, and that's the example. Now, if somebody wants fish or if they want something to eat, you certainly wouldn't give them a snake.

Now, I'd like to go to Matthew, as long as we're there, Matthew 10:16. It talks about our Christian life and then our calling. "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." Now, what did we read earlier? That the serpent or the snake was more cunning than any other beast of the field. So, be wise as a serpent, figure it out. In other words, ask for that kind of ability to make decisions. And so, we, as Christian, we're living in the midst of wolves and they're out for us. We're often called sheep, Christians are in the Bible. So, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. In other words, don't be… How many people have been attacked by vicious doves lately? No. Okay. You haven't watched Alfred Hitchcock's movie, "The Birds," I suppose, but that was what, blackbirds and other things.

If we take a look then, there's an interesting read. If we go to Luke 10, the disciples were sent out and asked to do wondrous things, and Christ gave them the power to do so. And in Luke 10, starting in verse 1, "After these things the Lord appointed seventy others also, and sent them two by two before His face into every city and place where He Himself was about to go." So, we have 35 pairs of people who were appointed to go ahead and gave them instructions. And I'll go down to verse 17, and look what these 70 responded when they returned. In Luke 10:17, "And then, the seventy returned with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.'" Wow. God has given His called out ones the power over demons. This is huge, this is worthy of another entire message. But they were amazed because they knew it, they confronted it, they used Christ's name and were able to cast out demons.

Verse 18, "And He" meaning Christ “said to them, 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.'" Wow. So, we're using this here, trample on serpents and scorpions, things that are going to hurt them. This can be taken both literally and rhetorically here because Satan is called a serpent or, in this case, a dragon earlier is what we've read. So, the power over them to prevent us from becoming hurt.

Verse 20, "Nevertheless do not rejoice in this,” in other words, it isn't us, this is something we're doing, "that the spirits are subject to you,” It isn't you that's doing it, "but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven." In other words, you are the called out ones, God is putting you in the Book of Life, and that's where the authority, that's where the power comes from.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians 11:3. He wrote a reminder in 2 Corinthians 11:3, "But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that's in Christ." The apostle Paul is referencing that verse in Genesis, where the serpent is the most cunning beast of the field, went on to deceive Eve. And he's explaining this that we have to be careful not to be deceived, that let's not overthink this, this isn't complicated. The calling that Jesus Christ and God the Father have given us is not that complicated, it's really quite simple. What He expects us to do is to follow God, keep His commandments, accept what God is willing to give us, His grace, and follow His instructions.

Let's take a look at Revelation 12:9. In Revelation 12:9, there's another word for that serpent. In Revelation 12:9, "So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; and he was cast to earth, and his angels were cast with him." We know that about one-third of the angels went with Satan when he was cast to be then the small G, god of this world as a Satan, a cunning beast of the field.

But what's the destiny of this cunning beast of the field, this Satan, in Revelation 20:2? In Revelation 20:2, we see the ultimate destiny of that serpent. When Christ returns with the Kingdom of God to this earth, in Revelation 20:2, "He laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years." There's a time coming when that serpent will be bound. So, this is a wondrous thing, to just watch a serpent operate, just like it's amazing how you think somebody is converted and working with God if they're not careful, just as Eve they can be deceived. And you go, "How did that happen?" I had a lot of faith, trust, and confidence in somebody, yet they let their guard down and they were deceived because of the cunningness of Satan, but someday, Satan will be bound.

So, Proverbs, the second point, what's wondrous, remarkable is “the way of a serpent on a rock.” The third example given in Proverbs 30:19, the third example is “the way of a ship in the midst of the sea.” I don't know how many of you have been on a ship at sea. I was raised in about the middle of the North American continent, not a lot of ocean in there. I've seen the great lakes and I've been on lakes, raised in the land of 15,000 lakes, so I've been on the water a little bit, but not really the ocean.

But it was many years ago, I was living in Oregon, I had the opportunity to go bottom fishing off the Oregon coast. It was a pretty exciting trip. We left in the wee hours of the morning and drove about three hours to a little town called Garibaldi Bay. And we boarded a small charter fishing boat. And, at dawn, we went out to sea. And, you know, we went over the sandbar, out into the open ocean, and then it wasn't long before I lost sight of land. And, you know, for somebody who's always seen land his entire life, never ever being where I couldn't see the land, there was just ocean in every direction, the Pacific Ocean was there. And the waves seemed to come from every direction. I'd really lost my sense of direction. If it was up to me, I don't know that we'd ever made it back to land, just clueless, I didn't know where to go.

And after a while, with the waves that were rolling and rocky, and it wasn't just forward and back, it was side-to-side, and sometimes a combination. The closest thing to it was like riding on a bale wagon on the farm where you've got the rocking motion of the baler squeezing the hand to bales. And then, over difficult terrains, they always stood with their legs apart. My dad said, "Always stand on the bale wagon like you wet your pants." So standing, you're a kid, you're just standing with your… And only later did it occur to me how would he know how that was.

So, to keep your balance, he'd want to stand with your legs apart. So, I'm taking the hay bale wagon, I'm standing with my legs apart trying to roll with this, but after a while, I wasn't sure which end was up, I was kind of dizzy. Several hours later into this, I thought it'd really be best to spend the rest of my time sitting down. And even after I got home, it took about three days to perform my balance and equilibrium had fully returned because the world continued to move. I'd lay on the floor and I was falling off the floor, this is not a good feeling. Those of you that have been on ships, you can laugh at me, it's okay. I just know that I was not destined to be a sailor without a lot more training and experience.

If we read, we read about King Solomon in 1 Kings 9 and 10, and we read about the amazing things that ships were able to do. King Solomon was quite an empire, the United Kingdom, and Israel at that time. King Solomon in 1 Kings 9:26, "King Solomon built a fleet of ships… on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom." In other words, not just a ship, a fleet of ships. What do you need to build ships? Well, you need the raw materials, in that case, wood, and you need the craftsmanship, the knowledge of how to do it, and then somebody who is actually able to do it.

And if we go to 1 Kings 10:11, "And also, the ships of Hiram, which brought gold from over Ophir, brought great quantities of almug wood and precious stones from Ophir." In other words, they were gathering things from around the world, things of value. 1 Kings 10:22, "For the king had merchant ships at sea with the fleet of Hiram. Once every three years, the merchant ships came bringing gold, silver, ivory," and this is interesting, "apes and monkeys.” Novelties, remarkable things. Notice it says “every three years.” How long does it take to sail around the world? Long time. Magellan's crew did it in about a year after the end of the medieval time period and the Age of Exploration, they were able to do that with the Portuguese. So, they were sailing around. In fact, there's evidence of that, we'll get to that in a minute.

The reign of King David was followed by the reign of his son, Solomon, so it was somewhere around 1000 B.C. to around 930 B.C., which is almost 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. The ships were known to travel trade routes around the world. We now documented it about 4,000 years before Christ because we have all this evidence all over the world of the trade that's occurring. And, of course, there a Norwegian sailor in the 1950s named Thor Heyerdahl, and, you know, he wanted to demonstrate that you could use primitive methods and sail pretty much around the world.

Well, first of all, he had to get from Europe to the Americas, or from Asia to the Americas, so he went to Egypt. And he wove and thatched up a raft made out of papyrus reeds. And he got goatskins, the things that they would have in those days, use linen to make rope. And bound it all together and put on his little sail, and, by himself, sailed across the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, and landed in Central America. Thus proving that you could have the Pyramid peoples from the Middle East settle in Central America because there was a great debate, could this even have been done.

So, Thor Heyerdahl went on and developed the next expedition. He went to South America, down in southern Chile, and he did something similar there. And he built his raft called the Kon-Tiki II, the first one was Kon-Tiki, the second one was Kon-Tiki II. And he took his raft and he sailed it to the Polynesian islands, proving that there was commerce between South America and the South Pacific Islands. And once you get to some of the islands, they can hop all the way in.

The Polynesians developed, and it's been around for thousands of years, double hauled sea craft, like two canoes latched together with poles so that they could not tip over when they're out on the high seas because the waves come up. I remember, in Japan, going across a bay, taking a boat across the bay, and we looked afar and I could see the fishing boats and the waves were such that sometimes you saw them, sometimes you didn't. “Whoa!” You know, they would disappear, "Oh, no, they went down. Oh, no, there they are, they're back up again. So, the sea was very unsettled. But for them, that was just natural, that was just normal.

In 800 A.D. to 1000 A.D., the Vikings would sail around the top of the world. They traveled up the rivers, it was much warmer then than it is now. And they sailed from the Arctic, down into Asia, as far as Mongolia, they sailed up the rivers of Egypt. In America, we've got evidence of the Vikings from Canada, down into North Dakota and Minnesota, they even came up from the Gulf of Mexico, up into Oklahoma. They didn't have a compass to guide them. They didn't have a sextant to plot their position. They had the sun, the moon, and the stars, the planets, that they could do. The astronomer's astrolabe wasn't invented until about 1000 A.D., a little over 1,000 years ago.

1480, Prince Henry of Portugal developed the Mariner's brass quadrant. How do we tell the sun, moon, and stars when you cross the equator and you can't see the North Star anymore? Well, that was a problem, so they figured that out. So, they wondered too, and then, of course, finally, they developed the sextant, now we have G.P.S., Global Positioning Systems, all just a wonder as to how they were able to get around the world and back, okay? To go someplace and get it back.

So, indeed, how a ship goes upon the sea is really considered a wondrous thing. So, point three in Proverbs 30:19, what's wondrous, “a way of a ship in the midst of the sea.” And really, now, this is where we're going with this is point four in Proverbs 30:19, "the way of a man with a maid." That, in fact, I think that's the King James Version. New King James is "way of a man with a virgin," the New English Translation, "the way of a man with a woman."

The dynamic that develops between a courting couple is interesting. I see this behavior on a daily basis where I teach high school. There's this back and forth conversation, the eye contact, the posturing, the constant smiling, maybe hanging back from the rest of the crowd so they can kind of walk together to the next class. And, of course, they're all experimenting with relationships. And it's amazing who gets attracted to whom. And I am often befuddled by some of the combinations, who would have thought that?

But, you know, it's been sometime now and so I do a lot of testing of students. And I've found that there is a test that I can predict who the keepers are and the ones who have a chance to stay together. Now, there's a 95% crash rate in high school, they're teenage relationships, so that's not really what I'm looking at today because they're just experimenting and it's just, you know, 5 out of 100 might last beyond high school. But there is a test that you can use to test whether or not they'll still tolerate each other in 15 years.

The Bible gives us the story of a number of courtships, we read, and then I'm not going to turn to it, but we turn to the story of Isaac and Rebecca in Genesis 24. And here we have an arranged marriage, where Abraham's servant went to pick out a bride for his son, Isaac, to inherit everything. And who would have inherited if the servant did not pick out a bride? Well, the servant would have inherited as the eldest or as the senior servant. And yet, he followed Abraham's advice and followed the instructions that Abraham, through God's Spirit, gave that information to his servant and picked out Rebecca to be Isaac's bride. It's really quite a story, there's a separate message on that that we have in our archives.

Then there's a story of Jacob and Rachel, it's also in Genesis, but in Genesis 29, how that courtship developed, and how he would willingly work for years for his bride, and it seemed but just a short time. In other words, you see this courtship that's going on. And then, we have an entire book of Ruth that tells us about the courtship, and the basics, and the background, and the fulfillment of the courtship between Boaz and Ruth.

Well, these courtships or these stories of relationships of about a man and a woman getting together to be joined, there's a reason for that, and we can see that in Matthew 22. And I'm only going to paraphrase. In Matthew 22, it's a parable about marriage and the wedding supper as a type of the Kingdom of God, and people being invited to that particular wedding supper as guests. In other words, the Father is putting on this wedding supper. And then we find in Matthew 25, we have the parable of the five wise brides and the five foolish brides, the ones that are preparing for a wedding. And really, this is really bringing us to a greater understanding of how we are actually to be the bride of Christ when God ushers in His Kingdom on this earth. We are part of that courtship process, where we can then be the Bride of Christ because take a look at the fulfillment of this time in Revelation 19.

Let's take a look at Revelation 19, and starting in verse 7. Revelation 19:7, "Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready. And to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints." He's talking about us, He's talking here about how we have to make ourselves ready. That's what this period of time is, just before the spring Holy Days, before Passover, to make ourselves ready just as a bride is busy making herself ready for the wedding ceremony.

Verse 9, "Then he said to me, ‘Write: “Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb!”’" Wow, we have a calling, we have an opportunity, by God who has given us, to welcome us to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Our sense of wonder, our sense of amazement, our sense of gratitude, then, should be existing for we're still thankful that we can be part of that wedding supper, that we can be the Bride.

But there's also a warning that comes with that. In Revelation 2, starting in verse 1, in Revelation 2:1, and there's letters to the churches. And in Revelation 2:1, we read this letter to the Ephesians, "To the angel of the church of Ephesus write, 'These things says He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands: ‘I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you've tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars; and you have persevered and have patience, and have labored for My name's sake and not become weary.’"

Wouldn't it be wonderful if God would say that about us, each one of those things? "I know your works, I know your labor, your work, your patience, that you can't bear those that are evil.” You want to put that away from you. “You've tested those who say they're apostles and aren't, and found them to be liars; have you persevered, have you had patience, labored for My name's sake and not become weary?" What a wonderful, wonderful compliment if each of us could bring that to ourselves and do our best to be worthy of that.

And then, it gives us this warning. In this letter to the church of Ephesus, verse 4, "Nevertheless I have this against you, you've left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place–unless you repent. But this you have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate."

Verse 7, "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God." So, while we all have this opportunity, this calling from God, we have to be grateful for that calling and do as the Ephesians did, and then be careful to not wander away from our first love. What was our real focus about, what should we be focused on, and not doing it because it's just a habit and not because it's in our heart.

So, point four, the summary of point four in Proverbs 30:19, in “the way of a man with a maid.” Really remarkable, remarkable sense. And if we take a look, and let's just read this whole thing through now. In Proverbs 30:18-19, "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I don't understand. The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a maid."

Our calling them before God is a wondrous, awesome calling. If you take a look at these verses, they go and they increase in intensity until they get to the last one where that special relationship exists, because it starts out like a drum beat. It starts out low and slow, and pretty soon, it gets loud and strong.

Our calling to be part of God's family is more remarkable than how an eagle manages to fly through the air. Our calling to be part of God's family is more amazing than how a serpent moves on a rock. Our calling to be part of God's family is more extraordinary than how a ship sails the sea. Ultimately, our calling to be part of God's family is modeled by the marvelous and sensational way that a man and woman become attracted to each other.

These verses, Proverbs 30:18-19 demonstrate our calling to God, God's ways are even greater than the amazing four things listed. And our calling, then, is a tremendous and wondrous hope that lies before us. So, let's be full of gratitude, be able to be part of God's calling. As we seek to do God's will, let us be filled with gratitude, then, as we approach the upcoming spring Holy Day season.