Job 38 "Assurance in Providence"

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Well, again, I apologize for the congestion that you're going to hear, and no doubts probably the sniffles and the sneezes and most likely even some coughs here and there that you will hear.
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That question is one that's very important and one that I would remind us today, even in these catechism questions
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I hope are renewing to each one of us. I would encourage you to think about, even in the case of Cain and Abel, was one form of worship acceptable while the other one was not before God?
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Yeah. So today is an important day to remind ourselves, are we worshiping
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God today the way that He has directed us to worship Him? It's something that we should take into high consideration when it comes to the fear of Yahweh, the fear of the
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Lord, and the whole text of the book of Job is, do we fear Yahweh enough to worship Him as the way that He has told us to worship
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Him? And that's the important thing from that catechism question, I believe. So let us pray before we read.
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We're going to be in Job chapter 38 today, so please start making your way there. Let us pray, though, specifically that our worship might be acceptable today to God.
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Let us pray. Lord, we ask today that the singing, the reading, the praying, the fellowship,
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Lord, all these different ways that we seek to worship You, Lord, that it would be acceptable. Lord, that we would not just do these things haphazardly or willy -nilly or ways that are disregarding what
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You have told us to do, Lord, but that we would follow Your commands, that we would instill the principles of the fear of Yahweh upon our hearts, upon our minds, that we would have this wisdom, this knowledge of who
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You are, Lord, that we would honor Your word, honor Your command, that we would exhort ourselves to be faithful servants of Yours today,
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Lord. God, may we have the same resilience that we see Job have even in this text in the midst of hardship and trial.
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Lord, may we glorify You today through the reading and the teaching of Your word, Lord, and may this text encourage, renew, remind ourselves of who
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You are, that Lord, even as we look out at the stars and the nights, here in Hagerman especially, where we can see the clarity of the stars,
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Lord, that we would just be in awe of Your creation, that we would be in awe of You as our
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Creator. Lord, we glorify You today, and we ask this in Jesus' name.
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Amen. Job chapter 38 is where we are at for this morning.
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The title of the message I have given it today is Assurance in Providence.
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I've been really taken back by the way that God is answering to Job and the friends here in this text.
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He answers in some really remarkable ways, as we're going to see here in a moment. But last week,
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I just want to remind us, we went through just a few verses last week. We only went through four verses, and we considered some of the lessons that we've learned from the life of Job thus far, and some of the things that we could take away from the friends, and then three of the things that I think, as the reader, we ought to be reminded of as we look through what
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God is going to be saying. Let's go ahead and begin today by just reading what we went through last week, verses 1 through 4.
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Job chapter 38, it says this, This text from last week is the beginning of God's dialogue here with Job, and with the four friends of Job that are here hearing these words.
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He's going to be asking a series of rhetorical questions that are obviously answered for us, the reader.
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The way that God has chosen to encourage Job and to answer the falsities that the friends have taught to Job is by actually magnifying his character in the midst of Job's suffering.
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Now, you might think to yourself, what kind of application, why is this pertinent to myself today? Why would I need to read
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Job chapter 38? When we go through suffering today, how can we be encouraged?
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By reminding ourselves of the immutable character and greatness of our
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Almighty Creator God. That is how we can be encouraged by the text that we read through today.
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Ask yourselves in the midst of your own suffering, in the midst of your own persecution, in the midst of the hardships that you may go through today, ask yourselves the very things that God rhetorically asks
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Job. Brothers and sisters, were you there when God laid the foundation of the earth?
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No, you weren't. God was there, and it is that same God who looks over you.
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Take courage in that. Take hope in that. This text that we're going to be looking at again is answering
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Job, and there's many types of people out there that would have different speculations over...
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And we see this with the friends. They've been speculating, they've been arguing amongst themselves and with Job about the character of God.
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These chapters should leave no shadow in our mind about the trustworthiness of what
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God says and reveals Himself about in this text. When we look and we can consider and argue back and forth about what the friends said was true, what wasn't true, the areas where we could disagree with, is the words of God in these chapters, chapter 38 all the way to the end of chapter 41, is what
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God reveals about Himself true? Yes. Yes, it is. And it can and it should be trusted by us.
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So we're going to be reading the entirety of chapter 38. We're going to be giving some added commentary through these verses as we go through it, just to help remind us and settle in our minds that God alone is
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God, that His ways are higher than our own, and that the same God who says these things to Job is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and because of this, we can take assurity in the fact that He has province in all things.
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I've been greatly reminded of this this week, that the same God of this text here, in His epic, sovereign control of all things, is the same
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God that we trust in today, acting the same way as He described Himself to Job.
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It's the same God that we have today, that Job listens and hears the words from God in that day of Job.
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The reason that I've been reminded about this is the seminary class that I'm in, I've been working on writing a paper, and it's the relevance of the
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Old Testament for the New Testament church. What value is there in reading the Old Testament?
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And it's funny, because most of my pastorate of being here at Valley Baptist, we've been actually in the Old Testament.
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And so I think there's a great value of the Old Testament. One of the reasons is, is because God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
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If God revealed Himself sufficiently unto salvation through faith in Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, you and I, brothers and sisters, should be able to look at it and see that same image of Christ therein.
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Jesus Himself, in the road of Emmaus with those two disciples, He says, all these things were pointing to Me.
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The prophets, they spoke of Me. These Jews in the Old Testament, when they were reading the book of Job, when they were looking to these things, they saw
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Jesus. They saw the same God that we worship today therein. Now, there's objections from people of all kinds about the
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God of the Old Testament, which I'm saying is the same God of the New Testament that we have today. I am sure that every one of us in this room have heard even a man named
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Richard Dawkins. I'm sure we've all heard of who Richard Dawkins is. There might be a few children here who don't know who
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Richard Dawkins is. Richard Dawkins is a leading atheist, and he has a book called
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The God Delusion. Before we even read the quote that I'm going to be saying from this book,
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I want you to understand that you should not trust anything that comes from this forked -tongued man who could not tell you any true moral principle, as he is a reprobate deserving of God's eternal condemning wrath.
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This is a man who hates God. In several cases,
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I would encourage anybody that has wisdom and truth on his side that they could look through with the proper lens, biblical lens, and glean some information from secular individuals, leaving behind some areas and taking for other areas into matter.
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This man should be utterly rejected because of some of the statements he says and his lack of moral principle.
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But this is the quote that I want to let us see and examine today. This is
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Richard Dawkins who says this about the God of the Old Testament. This is his quote. The God of the
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Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic racist, inficidal, genocidal, filicidal, pesticidal, megalomaniac, sadomasochist, capriciously malevolent bully.
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That's what he says about our God from the Old Testament. Now, immediately our presuppositional apologetics should kick in, and I would remind you that a man that rejects a transcendent moral law and the transcendent lawgiver himself cannot complain in an honest way about the actions done by the
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God he hates. And that goes for a man like Richard Dawkins. It is this
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God whom Dawkins hates that you and I worship and submit to today because it is the same
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God of the New Testament, the same God that we worship, the same God that he is talking about even in a text like Job 38.
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I would argue that many individuals, and this is something that even Christians fall into, is confusing the idea that the
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God of the New Testament is separate and different than the God of the Old Testament, or that the
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God, our one and only God, acts differently. The same
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God in the Old Testament that deals in Dawkins' opinion harshly but according to his word justly is the same
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God to whom you and I pray today, Lord, come quickly.
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That prayer, Lord Jesus, come quickly, that wonderful saying from the book of Revelation is uttered not only because we desire to have our tears wiped away, but it is also the cry for God to vindicate in severe eternal wrath all those that persecute his church and reject the
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Messiah. We're saying, Lord, come and judge these individuals when you ask that to Jesus.
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Let's pray real fast over this, just this idea of, Lord Jesus, come. Lord, we thank you,
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Lord, that you are the same. We take courage that when we read this text that it is you too who have spoken to Job, that you too know us, that you are sovereign over us.
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Lord, we do ask that you would come and wipe away our tears. We do know that,
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Lord, eventually there will be a day that we say, death, where is your victory? But, Lord, even today, may we take courage that you have providence in all things.
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May our assurance be found in the reality that you are sovereign because you have declared it to be so.
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Lord, may you come and may you judge those that hate me, those that hurt your church, those that seek the blood of your bride.
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Lord, may you come and vindicate her. Lord, may you blot them out forever and pour your eternal wrath upon those that hate me.
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Lord, you are the same in this text today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Lord, because of this, we thank you and we ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, who we say, come quickly.
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Amen. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
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These words offered to Job in the midst of suffering should be encouraged to us today, the reader, the preacher, the hearer of today.
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We should have great hope in the God who speaks these words to our brother in the faith, Job. So when we read these things, brothers and sisters, again, these are a series of rhetorical questions that are being posed by God to Job, and I want you to realize what they do for Job, ultimately.
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He approaches God out of respect and honor and fear by repenting, and he almost takes courage, as we'll see in future days.
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He's encouraged by these words that God says. Now, I want to also let us know that these rhetorical questions bring about a self -evident revelation from God to us that God is the ultimate or the first cause of all things.
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And this chapter, when we're reading this, I do not want us to take a physical, literal sense of everything that is said in here.
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The reason I say that is that there's many people, hyper -literates, that I would say, that would look at the cases that we're going to see in here and say, you see,
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God says he encloses the sea with doors and the water jars of heaven. There's two extremes on this.
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One will say, you see, God misspoke about how the world around us works.
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Does God hold jars up in the sky, and that's how rain happens? No, that's not how this takes place.
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So there's one side that would say, you see, God got it wrong. He can't be trusted. And then there's another extreme on the side that says, we can't trust anything else in the world other than what
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God says. So if there is jars that is spoken about, then there has to be jars in the heavens. You just don't see it. This is why flat earthers love the book of Job.
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People who deny the world being a globe, they look at these kind of texts and they say, I love the book of Job because there's these poetic languages that I can take and I can abuse, and it's done in a very atrocious way.
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You remember that this is a poetic genre, a historical genre nonetheless, but it's poetic and it's what it's saying.
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I like using these examples all the time, and I've used them several times, but if I said, man, John and I, we got into a fight and we really locked horns, does that mean that it was a good fight?
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Yes. Or does it mean that we had horns and we got stuck together with each other's heads?
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No. What about if I said he really knocked my socks off in that fight?
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Should you go outside and try to look for my socks, or should you assume that he won the fight? This is rhetorical, poetic, metaphorical language that we're going to see in here that we should not take in the literal sense of what they mean, but we need to read the genre for what it has for us.
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And what is the genre proved to us as we're going to see in here is that the sea, the rain, and all the things underneath heaven, all the things in heaven, they are
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God's, and that God has providential control over all things, and that there's purpose in all things.
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That's what we should be taking away from this text as we're going to read. You're going to see this here in a moment. Let's go ahead and read. We're going to read the entirety of this chapter.
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It's a lengthy chapter. We'll start in verse 4, where we just read, and we'll continue on.
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Where were you when I lay the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you know understanding.
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Who set its measurements, since you know? Or who stretched the line on it?
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This is God speaking to a group, a band of men who have just tried to explain who
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God is and his justice, his moral character to Job. And now God is speaking to all of them.
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He's speaking directly to Job, and he's saying, you tell me, if you think you're so wise, where were you when
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I laid the foundation? Where were you when I measured the earth itself? Or who stretched the line on it?
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On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone? When the morning stars sung together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
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Brothers and sisters, when the stars were hung in the sky, did any of us behold it? Did any of us see that take place?
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No. Who is the only one who saw it? Who is the only one who did it? It's God.
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Or who enclosed the sea with doors? Again, should we be taking that literal and say, where are the doors of the sea outside?
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No. Or who enclosed the sea with doors? When bursting forth it went from the womb.
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When I made a cloud its garment. I want to pause in verse 8 and think about this for a moment. God, our God, is so great in his sovereign control and the creation of the seas.
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Brothers and sisters, how many times would you have to scoop your hand in the sea to even come close to transfer the waters that we see out there?
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You can't. Yet God is the one who poured it out. Yet God is the one who has declared where its door would be.
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When we think about all the raving ocean and the surfers that are riding the waves today, they're doing it because God is sovereignly controlling those things.
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And you might think to yourself, well, doesn't the moon play a fact? Yes, it does. But God is sovereign over the moon. I think about even just the recent event that we saw as a nation and the eclipse.
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And we think about all the scientific stuff that goes into that. God is sovereign over all those things.
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When I made a cloud its garment and a dense gloom its swaddling band, and I placed boundaries on it and a set of bolts and doors, and I said, thus far you shall come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves stop.
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You realize that this text is not only teaching that God is the creator of these things, but that God tells the ocean where to stop.
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God has drawn the borders of the waves. Every time a wave crashes onto the beach and it comes up and knocks over the castle, you want to know why it knocked over the castle?
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Because God had told it to. And it did not go an ounce further than where God told it to go.
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Have you ever in your life commanded the morning and caused the dawn to know its place?
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That it might seize the ends of the earth and the wicked be shaken out of it.
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It is changed like clay under the seal and they stand forth like clothing.
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From the wicked their light is withheld and the arm raised high is broken.
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The morning itself, brothers and sisters, God is the one who is providential in these things.
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He's the one that sustains all these things around us. If God was there a moment to remove
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His hand from these things, He would cause calamity and destruction beyond what we can even rationalize.
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Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Think about this for Job.
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Again, here he's in suffering and God is encouraging him by saying, Job, have you ever been to the bottom of the ocean?
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God is saying, I know what it is like down there. I have. I know exactly what it's like down there because I'm the one that's controlling what's down there.
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I'm the one who's sovereign that's down there. I'm the one that's sitting upon my throne and the bottoms of the sea does exactly what
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I tell it to do. Have the gates of death been revealed to you?
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Or have you seen the gates of the shadow of death? Have you carefully considered the expanse of the earth?
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Tell me if you know all this. Again, brothers and sisters, how many of us see tragedy day in and day out and see death around us?
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God says that He sees those gates. Death doesn't just happen out of mere coincidence.
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The things that seem strange to you and I, they're not strange to God. It's not like He gets caught off guard in His sovereignties.
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It's not like He doesn't see or know what's going to take place tomorrow. God sees the gates of death itself.
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Where is the way to where the light dwells? In darkness, where is its place?
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That you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home.
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You know, for you were born then and the number of your days is great.
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Again, this is rhetorical sarcasm that God is offering. You think of these three friends who are talking to Job.
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They're all older than Job except for Elihu. Elihu's younger. And God's saying, tell me, you are so great in years.
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You must know these things. Your hair is gray. You must know where the deeps are.
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You must know who guides the stars. You must know all these things. But they do not.
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Have you entered the storehouses of the snow? Or have you seen the storehouses of the hail? Which I have reserved for the time of distress, for the day of war and battle.
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Where is the way that the light is divided or the east winds scattered on the earth?
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Brothers and sisters, we think about who's the most eldest one in this room?
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Don right here, right? And all those years and gray hair upon his head, he cannot tell us in magnitude of what
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God is telling Job in this text. Don could spend the next many years of his life trying to explain to us the years of knowledge that he has gotten, and it would pale into comparison to even one word that God is telling
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Job here. God is greater in every respect to Don, to Job, to everyone that's in this text, to everyone in this room here who has cleft a conduit for the flood or a way for the thunderbolt to bring rain on the land without people, on a desert without a man in it.
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Brothers and sisters, if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? The rain that lands in the desert that you never hear about, that you never know, that no man has ever seen, yet there is foliage that grows there,
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God ducks it. God hears the tree when it falls because God predestined,
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God caused, God was there when it fell. Even when you were sleeping in your bed at night, all things around you are being held together by our sovereign
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God who's sustaining everything around you to satisfy the waste and the desolate land and to make the growth of the grass to sprout.
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Has the rain a father? Or who has begotten the drops of dew?
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From whose womb has come the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth?
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Water comes like hard stone and the surface of the deep is interlocked.
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Can you bind the chains of Pladius or loosen the cords of Woron? This is speaking about the stars in this text.
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Can you lead forth a consolation in its season and guide the bear with her satellites?
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Do you know the statutes of heavens or fix their rule over the earth? What God is doing in this text,
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He's showing the great magnitude of His providential hand in the work of all things.
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Of all things. We think about, we see this often here in Idaho as we are transitioning into springtime and in warm weather.
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The stars and all these things that are giving us aid and warmth around us.
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God is saying, I'm the one that's sustaining those things. Yet how many times go by day in and day out that we just don't even think about that?
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That we don't even glance to God or think to God, thank You for these things. If you can't even consider those things, how dare we try to approach the throne of God and say,
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God, You are unjust for something. We ought not to behave like this.
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For God's ways are higher than our own and we cannot even comprehend in the slightest the magnitude of God and His work.
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Can you raise your voice up to the clouds so that an abundance of water will cover you? Can you send forth lightning that they may go and say to you, here we are.
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Who has given wisdom to the innermost being or given understanding to the mind? Who can count the clouds by wisdom or tip the water jars of heaven when the dust hardens into a mass and the clods stick together?
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Brothers and sisters, this is striking at the very words of what the three friends in Elihu have said.
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The three friends have painted a picture of God that He deals in these karma -like senses, that God is not active within His creation, that God essentially created things and stepped back and He's letting things take place.
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Brothers and sisters, God's providential care is so much greater than what you and I can even consider.
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You might think to yourself, well, is it robotic for God to be sovereign over all things?
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No, brothers and sisters, it's more robotic if God was to create things knowing what things would do and just steps back and lets them happen.
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You think about a robot, you think about gears, you think about a clock, and you think about how the clockmaker and the clockmaster, they would build the gears and they know exactly what those gears do.
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All they have to do is turn it on and they step back. Is there any providential care in a watch and a clock as it ticks and ticks and ticks?
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No. God is saying, no, I'm the one that's turning the clock gears. I'm the one who's sovereign over them.
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There's not a moment that goes by that I am not there. I'm in the recesses of the deep. I'm in the storehouses of the heavens.
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I am there caring for you when you don't even know I am. Can you hunt the prey for the lion or fulfill the appetite of the young lions when they crouch in their dens and lie in wait in their lair?
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Who prepares for the raven its provision when its young cry for help to God and wander about without food?
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Have you ever thought for a moment, those lions in Africa, I'm worried about them starving.
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Maybe I should go out and feed them. God is saying, I'm the one who cares for them.
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Who are you, old man, to think that you should be caring for what I have been caring for this entire time? It is
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I who do it. It is God who does it. Immediately, you think about that robotic expression that I've given with the clock master.
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Compare that to what God has revealed Himself towards us, His creation. And I think the potter and the clay is a perfect analogy to that.
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What happens when the potter lets go of his creation, when it is spinning around as it's being shaped? It falls apart.
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As it spins there in turmoil, with no one providing care to it, no one lifting up its side, no one that's actually molding it.
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It falls apart. It just so happens that in Scripture, God is described to us as the potter and we are the clay.
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Why would this be so important for Job? Because in this text, God emphasizes
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His control over all things around us. Imagine being there with Job that day and ask yourself, if God is guiding all these things, the stars, the bears, the seas, the clouds, the lightning, and more, would
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He forget about Job? Or would He not even be guiding him? Of course not.
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He's there with Job even right now. Of course not.
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By God showing how He's sovereign over all things, He is magnifying to the friends in Job that it would be foolish to think that Job is not being led by the sovereign hand of God according to His marvelous and glorious plan.
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Why does God make it rain on the desert? You may never know, but God does it.
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Why did Job's kids die? We might not ever know, but God prepared it.
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There's a human limitation that happens when we read this, because brothers and sisters, none of us can fully comprehend this.
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Let me also ask us this. After reading this chapter, do you or any of us know where the lightning will strike tomorrow?
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What about where the bear will make its bed? Do any of us know where that is? Who in this room or around us, who will take the last breath tomorrow?
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How many gallons of water will run through the Snake River by noon? How many hairs will fall off your head tonight as you sleep?
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How many times will your heart beat so that you might live tomorrow? None of us in this room can answer these questions with any kind of precision, but we can answer it with this.
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It will all be according to God's will. The lightning will strike where God says for it to.
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The bear will lay its head where God has prepared for it to. Those who die tomorrow draw their last breath, because that's what
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God had designed for them. God has planned every drop of water that will flow through all the rivers tomorrow by noon.
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God knows how many hairs are upon your head right now. What would make you think He doesn't know how many will drop out of your head tonight as you sleep?
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Your heart will beat according to His sovereign hand tomorrow. And this is all to His praise, brothers and sisters.
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Though you and I cannot answer with precision about the location, the number, or the event of tomorrow's dealings, we can confess that God has decreed it to take place nonetheless.
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What is encouraging Job in this text is that truth that there's assurance in God's providence.
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Do not try to remove God from your situations, as it will be chaos and turmoil if you do.
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Take assurance that God has a plan over these things. Trust in God's character. Is these words in Job 38 true for us as they are true for Job?
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Yes, they are. Are they encouraging for you and I just like they're encouraging for Job? Yes, they are.
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Trust in God's character. Friends, please, I beg of you, trust in His character.
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Do not act like the friends of Job who have elevated their will and understanding of things that are far too marvelous for us to understand today.
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God's ways are higher than our own, and I assure you of this, and we see that in this chapter.
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We're going to see that in next week's chapter and the following week after that. I would argue that's the whole main point of what we are seeing in the book of Job.
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That even in the chaos and the turmoil and the hardship and the suffering and the loss and the darkness and the despair and the pain that Job is suffering, it is happening because God is providentially shaping
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Job into the vessel that He desires it to be. God's ways are higher than our own.
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You cannot explain why God has it rain in the desert, nor do you always need to seek to try to explain why it rains in the desert.
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You don't have to explain why hardship comes about, but you need to have trust that God's providential care is there with you in it.
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There's assurance, I promise, you found within God's providence. Why do I say that? Because that's how
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God answers Job in the midst of his despair. I want to read in finality just from my preferred confession on a chapter that deals with divine providence.
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I think it's a fitting paragraph to read for the day's text. I praise the
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Lord for mighty men of the faith who have worded these things and these ways for us, but in chapter 5 of the
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Baptist Confession it says in paragraph 1, 2, and 7, and I'm not going to read everything, but just paragraph 1, 2, and 7, it says this,
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God, the good creator of all things in His infinite power and wisdom upholds, directs, arranges, and governs all
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His creatures and things from the greatest to the least by His perfectly wise and holy providence to the purpose for which they were created.
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He governs according to His infallible foreknowledge and the free and unchangeable counsel of His own will.
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His providence leads to the praise of His glory, of His wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness and mercy.
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Brothers and sisters, do you not glorify God over reading this chapter in the ways that you didn't even consider what
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God is doing in the background of our lives right now? I know there's no rain clouds around us, but I guarantee you it's raining somewhere right now and God is watering the grass there.
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It should lead to us praising and glorifying Him because He is far greater than you and I can ever imagine.
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Paragraph 2 says this. All things come to pass unchangeably and certainly in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, who is the first cause.
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Thus, nothing happens to anyone by chance or outside of God's providence. Yet by the same providence,
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God arranges all things to occur to the nature of second causes either necessarily, freely, or in response to other causes.
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Nothing is random, brothers and sisters. Nothing just happens to happen. Paragraph 7, and I would encourage you, this is one of the most important things for us today, is this.
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The providence of God in a general way includes all creatures, but in a special way, it takes care of His church and arranges all things to its good.
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When we say to its good, to the church's good, to the believer's good,
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God is the one who defines that good for us to go through because He's the one that's shaping us.
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Job and the sovereign hand of God that is behind the life of Job is so much different than the sovereign hand that is behind the three friends who are persecuting
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Job. God has a special care for Job even in the death of his seven sons and his three daughters.
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You might not see it. You might not know it, but God is there surely.
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Why? Let's ask those rhetorical questions again. Where were you when
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God laid the foundation of the earth? Where were you when the lightning struck last night?
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Where were you when the stars around us and their glory and their display lightened the dark last night?
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Where were you at? God has been working. God has been holding.
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God has been doing something marvelous in the background in the last 12 hours that's so far inconceivable for us to even comprehend.
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Brothers and sisters, take assurance that nothing in this life happens to you out of randomness.
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Nothing in this life happens to you that is not for your own good. Whether it seems to be terrible for you in your situation, it is for your good,
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I promise you, because God is the one who has ordained it. That's Romans 8, 28.
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For the Lord our God... Let's go read it actually before I misquote it. Romans 8, 28. It's a text that we've read several times.
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It says, And we know for those who love God, which I hope you and I today love God, all things work together for the good of those who are called according to His purpose.
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All things, brothers and sisters, means all things. Let us pray before we take communion. Lord, I thank
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You so much for Job 38, Lord. God, I do thank You for the comfort that is found.
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Lord, You who spoke this to Job, Lord, in this terrifying, awesome way out of the world, went out of this storm around Job, is then magnified and kept for us, the reader today, to be encouraged at Your character,
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Lord. God, may we trust in what You have prepared for us today.
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May we glorify You in what is to come tomorrow. And may we never forget that there is nothing that's outside of Your providence.
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There's nothing outside of Your decree, Lord. You know all things. You've decreed all these things,
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Lord. And God, we trust in You and Your character and what has been revealed to us and You giving us
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Your Spirit. You giving us our faith. You bringing us to salvation and Your Son, Jesus the
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Christ, Lord. God, may we trust. If our eyes are hurting, if our heart is broken, may we just continue to look back to Jesus Christ and take courage in what
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He has done, Lord. Lord, I ask this in Your name, Jesus the
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Christ, amen. Brothers and sisters, I would ask you to please stand as we take communion.
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Again, no particular order when coming up, just please come up and take both elements and go back to your chairs and let's pray with one another before we partake.
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Brothers and sisters, when we speak about all these mysterious things to you and I, the thing that continues to capture my mind is the same
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God who says that He cares, that the same God who says that He sees where the lightning strikes, that same
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God became flesh. That same one that spoke to Job died for Job and died for you and I.
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And if you trust in that flesh that was pierced upon the cross, take and eat in remembrance of Him.
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That infinite character, that God who we worship today who is far greater than what we can comprehend,
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He spilt His blood for us there upon Calvary. Is this valuable?
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Is the blood that covers you and I held to in honor today in the way that it should be? Brothers and sisters,
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I guarantee you it isn't. If you confess that it is the blood of Jesus that saves, you take and drink in the remembrance of Him.