And so I have an illustration to help us understand what we're talking about.
And I've got these spoons here.
And basically, God hath made our life like this, right?
And then they have sought out many inventions.
And this is what we've done to our life in a bunch of different areas.
And the Bible is saying God hath made man upright.
He's made them straight. He's made it normal.
And we have messed up our lives and turned it into this, right?
Now in Ecclesiastes 1, notice what the Bible says.
Ecclesiastes 1, verse 12.
I, the preacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem,
and I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom
concerning all things that are done under heaven.
This sword travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun,
and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight,
and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
Is it possible for me to make this straight again like it was five minutes ago?
No, because when you bend it back, it's still crooked, right?
And our life goes like this. It gets all bent.
And you try to straighten it out, and it becomes like this, right?
You know, this is the illustration I have here,
but at our house, I'm reminded of this
because of our curtain rod in our room.
And our kids will play, and they'll run into the curtains,
and slowly the curtain rod gets lower and lower and gets bent and bent
to the point where I cannot open and shut the windows anymore.
So I've got to take the curtain rod off, and then I bend it across my knee.
And you know what? We've got it higher so we can open and close the windows,
but our curtain rod looks like this, right?
It's a mess, and it's never going to be straight ever again
because once something gets bent, it cannot be straightened out by man.
It's not possible, right?
I mean, if you've got something that looks like this,
you can try to get it back to its normal form.
Unless you're some sort of sorcerer or magician or something,
it ain't going to happen, right?
Because that which is crooked cannot be made straight according to the Bible.
So you say, well, why are you saying that making the crooked thing straight?
Because there's a multitude of verses that talk about God straightening things.
And this is not a contradiction in the Bible.
The idea is this.
God has made us upright and made our life normal,
and we have done this to our life, and we cannot straighten this out.
But God can straighten and fix your life out.
Man's wisdom and man's power is never going to straighten out all the messes in your life,
but if we rely on God, God can actually straighten out the mistakes and problems that we've made.