August 5, 2022 Show with Dr. Mark Talbot on “Suffering & the Christian Life”

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Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century Gospel Minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the Church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet

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Earth, listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is

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Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fifth day of August 2022.

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And I have a guest on my program today that came as a result of the enthusiastic urging of my former pastor,

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Mike Gaydosch, who many of you have heard interviewed on this program and whose ads you hear every day for Mike's publishing ministry,

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Solid Ground Christian Books. He contacted me recently and said, You've got to get

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Dr. Mark Talbot on your program to discuss suffering. And I take

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Mike's recommendations very seriously, and I highly value his discernment.

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So I immediately contacted Dr. Talbot, and he immediately responded favorably, thank

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God. And we have our interview today on suffering and the

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Christian life. Dr. Mark Talbot is an author and associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

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And today's discussion on suffering and the Christian life is basically going to be based upon Dr.

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Talbot's books on suffering. They are a two -volume set, When the

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Stars Disappear, Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture, and also volume two,

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Give Me Understanding that I May Live, Situating Our Suffering with God's Redemptive Plan.

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And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the first time ever to Iron Triple Design Radio, Dr. Mark Talbot.

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Really good to be here, Chris. Well, please tell us about your post as associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College.

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Well, I've been at Wheaton since 92. My specialties include things such as Augustine, philosophical theology, philosophical psychology.

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My dissertation was on David Hume, who I was trying to show what exactly went wrong with his way of approaching philosophy.

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I've found teaching over the years to be just a great source of inspiration for thinking about Christian issues.

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Fantastic. And how else do you approach, so that the public may benefit from it, your wisdom on the issue of suffering, other than, of course, the books that we mentioned?

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Do you have a podcast, anything like that? I do. We've got a podcast.

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It's a new one. And the name of the podcast is When the Stars Disappear. And we have just, in fact, there have been nine episodes so far.

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The first seven are relatively casual. On the first book, When the

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Stars Disappear, starting with eight, we're going through Give Me Understanding that I May Live in Depth.

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And so that might be a worthwhile resource for some of your listeners. Now, how exactly would they begin to listen to or watch?

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I'm not sure if there's video involved as well. But how would they be able to benefit our listeners from this podcast?

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How can they hook up with it? Yeah, I think all they need to do is go to wherever they get podcasts from and just type in on the search line,

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When the Stars Disappear, because it's on all of the major podcast carriers. It's on Apple and Google and Podbean and all the rest of them.

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Great. Now we have a tradition here on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio.

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Whenever we interview a first -time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, including what kind of religious atmosphere they were raised in, if any, what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

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Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them. And I'd love to hear your story.

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Well, my story would start about the time I was 10, which would have been about 1960.

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My parents had not come from Christian homes. They had both become interested in Christianity, and we had started attending a

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Presbyterian church, and I went on a retreat to the

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Firs, which was in Bellingham, Washington. I grew up from the time

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I was seven north of Seattle. My dad was an engineer at Boeing. And when

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I went on this retreat when I was 12, I was starting to be afraid of some of the temptations that I was facing.

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And the fellow who wrote My Heart Christ's Home was speaking that weekend, and when he offered an invitation,

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I accepted it. The first year or so after that,

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I was pretty serious about my faith. I met a fellow who was part of the Navigators, and he was in the

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Navy, and he had me memorizing scripture. But then I found that I seemed to become more and more distracted by just kind of the typical things that one can get distracted by as a teenager.

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And, in fact, what happened, Chris, was that when

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I was 17, one week after the end of the school year,

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I was on a Tarzan -like rope swing. It went very fast.

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You could only stay on it if you were sitting on a seat that it had. Two of us had swung out over a gully.

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It started in a tree. There was about eight feet of dirt, and then there was a cliff.

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It swung out over a gully. A third guy was going to jump on when we came back.

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He waited until the rope hesitated. That meant that I caught him with one hand and held onto the rope with the other.

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We got out to the far end of the swing. I realized that he and I were going to fall, and I thought, if I fall on him,

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I'll kill him. So I shoved him one way, and I went off. I used to say the distance was 50 feet.

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I can't really be sure how far it was, but it was a long drop. When we hit the ground, it was dusk.

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I held him down because I knew he had to be hurt. After I got him calmed down,

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I saw that my legs were in this little creak, and I wasn't feeling anything. I knew that I had broken my back and that I had damaged my spinal column.

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Here's the interesting thing. I have found myself, especially from my sophomore year on, really concerned about my lack of discipline.

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I was a wild kid at school. I had raced go -carts and quarter midgets. I was driving cars at breakneck speeds down country roads.

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I was just worried about what was going to happen to me. When I thought of going to college,

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I knew I could get in because I knew I was bright, but I figured I wouldn't last a year because I wouldn't work hard enough.

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When I hit the ground and realized what had happened to me off this swing, immediately

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I had a sense that God loved me and that this, in fact, was his way of bringing me and keeping me close to himself.

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All of the distractions that had been bothering me for years just dropped away.

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That was the start of my really, really serious Christian experience.

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A year, three months later, I went to Seattle Pacific College at the time. It's now, of course, Seattle Pacific University.

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Dave McKenna was the new president. He took a great interest in me. Then Frank Kline came my sophomore year,

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Cliff McGrath as dean of students came my junior year, and the three of them gave me hundreds of hours.

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I had students who were regularly coming to me for counsel and comfort because I walked with one to two canes, and my walking was really awkward, and I think that students just felt

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I'd have to be concerned about them. Those fellows taught me how to informally counsel others as a

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Christian, and God's word just became my meat and drink. It was more important to me than anything else.

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As I was finishing college, Elton Troublet came. He could speak for an hour without a note and without breaking a sentence, and I found out later

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I had been set up that Dave McKenna had told him that when you have a tall guy, I was 6 '4", when you have a tall guy, limp up to you and ask what he should do next.

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Tell him he should get a PhD in philosophy. So after a year as a youth pastor, that was the course that I pursued.

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When did you realize that you had a calling in your life to enter into education, especially in the

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Christian realm? Yeah, I initially had thought after my accident that first year that I was in fact going to be a pastor.

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And I think that the sense that my call was to, in fact, function as a

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Christian in the academic realm and particularly in philosophy only grew on me as I was in graduate school.

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I first went to St. Louis University for a couple of years and then took some time off, ended up going back to the

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University of Pennsylvania to finish my PhD. And it was while I was at St. Louis U that I got this sense that my place is going to be as a

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Christian academic. Well, great. Well, I am glad that you are serving as an ambassador for Christ there at Wheaton College.

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I'm glad that God is using you to help prepare the young men to be ambassadors themselves in the name of Christ in this dark world.

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Yes. And I'm assuming that your experience falling off of that Tarzan rope and breaking your back has something to do with drawing you to want to not only reach the body of Christ but to reach everybody with biblical truth about suffering.

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And first of all, let me ask, has there been substantial permanent damage from that fall?

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I, in fact, am paraplegic. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, I walked with one or two canes until about, oh, let's see, it would have been 2005, at which point

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I had to go to forearm crutches. And 2 -16 in September, I was coming out of my study early in the morning, took a spill, broke a hip, and so since then have been in a wheelchair.

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Well, I've got to introduce you, if you do not already know him, to Justin Peters.

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I don't. You don't know Justin? No, I don't. Oh, he is a remarkable evangelist who is also paraplegic as a result of a childhood illness, actually.

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He was born with cerebral palsy and most of the time rides around on a scooter.

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And he has become a world -renowned, beloved figure, conference speaker, and evangelist.

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And he has been on my program a number of times, and he actually was one of my speakers for the

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio biannual pastor's luncheon. And I would love to have the two of you get to know each other.

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You might, who knows, may be able to team up for conferences and things like that. I would really appreciate that.

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And another brother who is, I think he may be a quadriplegic,

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Kevin Olson, who is an author I interviewed very recently as well on his book.

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But I will keep in touch with you about those matters. Good, good, thank you. Well, as I said before, the issue at hand, the subject that we are discussing, suffering and the

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Christian life, the contents of our conversation will be predominantly coming from two -volume work that you have written on the subject.

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Volume 1, When the Stars Disappear, Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture.

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And Volume 2, Give Me Understanding that I May Live, Situating Our Suffering Within God's Redemptive Plan.

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I want to read a glowing commendation for somebody who may be the most world -renowned figure in the church who speaks on this subject,

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Johnny Erickson Tada, founder of Johnny and Friends International, a disability center, and she wrote,

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Mark Talbot gives the reader a remarkable study of suffering saints and how their mistakes and victories teach us lessons of endurance.

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I highly recommend this stellar discussion of true Bible stories that will inspire and refresh your heart.

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And reading that reminds me that I have got to try to get Johnny on the program. Throughout the years

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I've tried, and every time I attempted to invite her on the program, there was always a schedule conflict, so I'm hoping that I'm successful in getting her on the program soon.

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Also, the Volume 2 work has been endorsed by someone who has been a guest on this program,

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Tim Challies, author of Seasons of Sorrow. Tim writes,

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One of the greatest difficulties about enduring a time of suffering or sorrow is that it so often seems purposeless.

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The path to peace is to set our suffering in the context of a wider story that God's telling in and through us, a story that Mark Talbot describes so well in the pages of this precious book.

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Very powerful words from someone like Tim Challies. Well, I am looking forward to our discussion personally, although I have never suffered physically to any great extent at all in my life, never had a serious disease, never had a disability.

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I have had my share of suffering when it comes to experiencing the death of loved ones, which started with my mother in 1995, with whom

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I was extremely close, who died of pancreatic cancer. Then the second experience was my dad passing in 1998, three years later from a heart attack.

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And then in 2010, I experienced the excruciating loss of my precious late wife,

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Julie, who passed of a heart attack, even though it's been 12 years.

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It still brings about very deep pain in my heart and mind with varying levels of intensity.

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Yeah. And so I know that I will be benefiting greatly from this conversation and from your books, which

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I just read, and I thank Crossway for shipping those out to us. Well, let's start with some initial thoughts that you may have on suffering that falls within the spectrum of every reason why a person suffers.

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It could be the loss of a loved one, as I've experienced. It could be even divorce.

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It could be the breaking up of an engagement with younger people.

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It could be the breaking up of a boyfriend -girlfriend relationship.

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It could be all kinds of reasons that let us down, being fired from a job, being overlooked for a promotion that was very much being counted upon because of a growing family and more bills to pay.

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There could be a host of reasons. And then, of course, the one that you have experienced, among others,

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I'm sure, but the physical suffering that people experience, whether it is those that are actually dying of cancer or some other terminal ailment and they know it, or they have experienced a disability like you have that has disabled them for perhaps even decades, or perhaps it's a new experience for someone who has just recently become disabled.

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Why don't you start off the conversation with an introduction to suffering? You mentioned,

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Chris, that some suffering is physical and some is not. One of the things that I tried to do in the second book was come up with a characterization of suffering that would cover all of the kinds of suffering that there are.

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And interestingly enough, you just don't find people trying to do that. What I came up with was that we suffer whenever we go through any experience which is unpleasant enough that we'd like it to end.

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We suffer whenever we go through any experience that is unpleasant enough that we'd like it to end.

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And, of course, that can cover physical suffering. It can cover grief. It can cover just the kind of mild suffering that each of us has at the end of a hard day's work.

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We need to cover all of those because Scripture is talking about all of those, and it's within the framework of trying to think of why

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Scripture says there is any human suffering and why God just doesn't take it away that we start to deal with what

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I call the general story. I've got the first book, When the Stars Disappear, is about people's personal stories with regard to suffering.

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And when Johnny made her remark about these stories from Scripture, the three main stories that I cover are the ones of Naomi and Job and Jeremiah.

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One thing I've found over the years is that, in our culture at least, Christians don't think that Scripture is going to tell them much about their suffering.

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They don't recognize that Scripture has a great deal to say about suffering. And so what

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I tried to do in the book was I tried to tell the story of Naomi to the point where as she gets back to Bethlehem and her friends ask,

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Is this Naomi? It's not clear to us whether or not that means that she was so transfigured by her grief of losing her husband and her two sons that they couldn't recognize her or if it was a kind of delighted,

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Is this Naomi? In any case, she said, Don't call me Naomi, which means pleasant. Call me

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Mara, which means bitter. I want to stop my exposition of her story in Chapter 2 right there when she's in the depth of her suffering.

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And you'll remember that Job said things such as, My eye will never again see good.

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So I cover him up to the place where he is most deeply involved in his suffering.

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With Jeremiah, as you know, it's in Chapter 20 that after he has been tortured by Pasher, the fellow who was in charge of the temple, that he ends up blurting out to God what are near blasphemies and saying,

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Look, you have deceived me with regard to what this ministry was going to be. So what

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I do is in the second chapter of the first book, I try to stop right there so that people recognize just how deeply

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Scripture acknowledges suffering. Then I have a chapter called

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Breathing Lessons, which is on the laments and the psalms and how we breathe in order to keep ourselves from feeling as if we're drowning.

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In the fourth chapter, there were only four chapters in each of these books, In the fourth chapter, I pick back up on Naomi's story and Job's story and Jeremiah's story.

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And what I'm trying to do there is I'm trying to show that for Naomi and for Job, they were just wrong in thinking that their lives would never be pleasant again or that they'd never see good again.

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The end of both of their stories is God restoring them to a certain kind of earthly happiness along with the way in which he deepened them spiritually.

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Now interestingly enough for Jeremiah, that never happened. In chapter 21, there's a different pasture, not the one that was in chapter 20.

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Jeremiah, from chapter 21 on, remains faithful in speaking God's word, but his life never got better.

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And in fact, if you take the first 20 chapters of Jeremiah to be more or less chronological, from 21 on, it's not chronological, and it reads, in fact, as the sorts of survival narratives that you get from people who have been tortured.

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So what I was trying to do in the first volume was make clear that God understands whatever kind of suffering we have, and he has spoken about all of the kinds of suffering in Scripture.

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You may remember, Chris, that when Sandy Hook happened, that there were pastors on some of the national networks on television who were so shaken by the number of children and adults who had been killed,

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I think it was 26, that they were obviously questioning God's goodness or their faith. It's really interesting that the slaughter of the innocent that Herod instituted when the wise men didn't come back the same way to him to tell him where Jesus was, that the innocents, the children that he slaughtered, were roughly the same number as we've had at Sandy Hook, and that tells us that God is aware of these things, that they haven't gotten out of his hands, that he understands our suffering and knows its depth.

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I have a friendship with a couple. In fact,

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I involved them in a conference years ago on the very issue of suffering, probably 20 years ago.

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Chuck and Sharon Betters, a pastor and his wife, they tragically lost their son in an automobile accident, earth -shattering, and really powerfully affected their lives, especially initially, where they did have this tragic questioning of their faith.

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They had believed the right things doctrinally about God's providence and his sovereign orchestration over all things that occur in heaven and on earth, but when it actually entered into their own lives, there was a period of questioning

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God's love for them, questioning God for, in their minds at that point, being merciless.

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In your experience, you seem to have immediately come to the conclusion that your accident was a sign of God's love for you, but in your experience, since you deal with the subjects so frequently publicly and your interaction with Christians, is that a common thing, especially for seasoned

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Christians, even pastors, even people who are doctrinally sound and believe the right things on paper, but when the rubber meets the road in their own lives, they have that period of doubt?

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Yes, yes it is. In fact, I start the first book by recounting the fact that I lost one of my students to suicide, and his parents had been deeply committed as Christians, and they just could not understand what had happened.

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And among other things, they took God's promises in Matthew 7, ask and you will receive and so on and so forth, as being more or less blank checks where if they prayed hard enough, they thought

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God would deliver their son. He was deeply depressed, and it didn't happen.

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I think almost always, for most of us, it's when we first experience really, really intense suffering that we find that our faith is in some sense on the line.

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There's a woman named Joyce Sackett who wrote a book, I think about 25 years ago, called

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Goodbye Janine. She lived in Colorado Springs, had memorized hundreds of scripture passages because she was a navigator.

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She was outside working in her garden early in the morning. She felt some uneasiness. When she came back in the house, she found out that I think

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Janine was 18, had hung herself in her bedroom. And it was interesting that for Joyce, she knew enough scripture and enough of the

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Psalms that she was able to keep her faith in place.

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But it took many years before she could work it through enough to be able to articulate the fact that God was with her in a deep, redemptive sense through all of that sort of thing.

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For me, the harder experiences were not so much my accident.

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It was the fact that I had a hard time finishing my dissertation. I had gone to teach at Calvin College, and I was having a horrible time finishing my dissertation.

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I ended up deeply depressed. What I found was that the only thing that could allow me to get through a day was to get up in the morning and read scripture or really deeply scripturally based theology for an hour and then pray.

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It was the only thing that gave me enough hope then to turn to my classroom and the dissertation.

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But that was for me the experience that was really hard. You'll remember, Chris, that in A Grief Observed, C .S.

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Lewis talked about how hard it was when he lost his wife, and he says, you know, I should have known all this.

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I've spoken about this stuff for years, but when it happens to you, you suddenly find that it's different than how you think about it before it happens to you.

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Yeah, amen. We have to go to our first break right now, and by the way, you mentioned suicide a couple of times there.

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I'm hoping that my dear friends Charlie and Terry Liebert are listening.

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Charlie and his wife just experienced an enormous tragedy in their family.

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Their adult son, who was involved in the military, he committed suicide and left behind a wife and children.

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And Charlie has actually written a book about this, how he has responded as a

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Christian. And he's going to be my guest next week on Tuesday, the 9th of August, so everybody listening can mark your calendars.

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But I hope Charlie and his wife Terry are listening now. And if not, God willing, to the recording, bless them.

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We're going to our first break, as I said. If you have a question for Mark Talbot, our email address is

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ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of red USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal interest.

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That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Mark Talbot and suffering and the

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Christian faith right after these messages. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here, excited to announce that my longtime friend

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I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love, as I have.

37:49

For more information on Hope Reformed Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.

37:55

That's hopereformedli .net. Or call 631 -696 -5711.

38:04

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Coram, Long Island, New York, that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

38:28

As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

38:41

A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

38:51

Grace Covenant Baptist Church believes it's God's prerogative to determine how He shall be worshiped and how

38:57

He shall be represented in the world. They believe churches need to turn to the Bible to discover what to include in worship and how to worship

39:05

God in spirit and truth. Grace Covenant Baptist Church endeavors to maintain a

39:10

God -centered focus. Reading, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, baptism, and communion are the scriptural elements of their corporate worship, performed with faith, joy, and sobriety.

39:25

Discover more about Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey at gcbcnj .squarespace

39:34

.com. That's gcbcnj .squarespace .com.

39:41

Or call them at 908 -996 -7654. That's 908 -996 -7654.

39:50

Tell Pastor Dunn that you heard about Grace Covenant Baptist Church on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Have you noticed the gap that exists between the

40:10

Sunday morning sermon and the Sunday school classroom or the small group study? So often we experience great preaching from the pulpit, but when it comes time to study

40:20

God's Word in those smaller settings, well, let's be honest, it leaves a lot to be desired.

40:26

It seems like it is nearly impossible to find a place in the Bible to find good curriculum out there today that is true to the

40:31

Word of God and is built upon sound doctrine. Much less, it's hard to find curriculum that will actually teach people how to study the

40:38

Bible. Hi there, my name is Jordan Too and I am the Executive Director of the Baptist Publishing House.

40:45

Our ministry is dedicated to providing local churches with sound Bible study resources.

40:51

Our quarterly curriculum is titled The Baptist Expositor, and for good reason. We are

40:57

Baptist, and we exegete the scriptures. If you want to have a curriculum that teaches your people how to study the

41:03

Word of God, I invite you, go to our website, download a free study, baptistpublishinghouse .com.

41:10

May God bless you. As a mother, I was looking for a magazine that would include devotionals that I could quickly do before school and had theology and doctrine made very simple for children to understand that they could read themselves or I could walk them through.

41:29

There's tiered content so that you can go to the older group and learn more or go to a younger section and it's even more simple.

41:38

Join us on our journey in developing our magazine entitled Ignited by the

41:43

Word which engages and ignites the hearts of our children and young people in their walk with God.

41:50

Order Ignited by the Word for your home today at ignitedbytheword .org

41:57

Learn more information and subscribe now at ignitedbytheword .org and receive your first two issues free and put good literature in your children's hands.

42:07

And please folks, don't forget that as I've said in previous broadcasts, the advertising contract for Ignited by the

42:16

Word is soon to expire and I am going to be making an effort to have them renew that advertising contract because their advertising dollars are very crucial for Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

42:32

Therefore, if you haven't done it already, please subscribe to Ignited by the Word magazine especially if you are a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, or anybody that is frequently involved with children in your life and perhaps even subscribe on behalf of someone who does have that kind of tie with children, a parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, etc.

42:59

So please, go to ignitedbytheword .org, ignitedbytheword .org, subscribe today and please mention, this is very important, mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

43:11

We're now back with our guest, Mark Talbot, Dr. Mark Talbot, who not only hosts a podcast

43:19

When the Stars Disappear, Probing Human Suffering and Applying Truth to Life's Most Crucial Questions, he is the author of a two -volume work on suffering and the crucial truth that we are really gleaning from today to have the content for our discussion.

43:39

And if you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

43:47

Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

43:52

USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And I can readily understand there being many people who have situations that have caused their suffering that they do not want to make public, especially they don't want to reveal their own identity about it.

44:14

So feel free to request to remain anonymous. But if you are just asking a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

44:23

We do have Ted from Moundville, Alabama, who says, your guest mentioned that he wrote his dissertation on David Hume and where he went wrong with his philosophy, which immediately struck me as a fascinating topic for a

44:38

Christian philosopher. So I'd like to ask, where did David Hume go wrong? I suspect that a considerable wrong turn on Dr.

44:47

Hume's part was rejecting the gospel, but what else can you tell us? Good question.

44:54

And I'm going to give a short answer because this is philosophy rather than theology or religion.

45:01

Hume grew up as a Scotch Calvinist and felt that his upbringing was so stultifying that his reaction was always against Christian faith.

45:16

And so he tried to work out a way of thinking about human beings and thinking about life that would block the chance for anybody to ask deep metaphysical questions, such as whether or not there's a

45:31

God. What I ended up doing was examining his epistemology, his theory of knowledge, and I wanted to show that he's what

45:43

I consider to be a cognitive naturalist. Now, I'm sorry to give you all these big terms, but what that means is that he thought that our minds were set up in such a way that they generally tracked the way that the world is, but you couldn't give arguments that would prove that.

46:04

And so it seemed to me that he was not completely off base with regard to his cognitive naturalism, but I think that cognitive naturalism should actually lead to belief in God.

46:16

And so at one point I wrote a piece called Is It Natural to Believe in God? working off Romans chapter 1, of course, verses 18 through 23, and concluding that, in fact, we will believe in God unless something has gone wrong with us.

46:34

And, of course, something has gone wrong with every human being to some degree or another. Sin affects us all. But it is natural to believe in God.

46:42

God has left his witness in the world, as it's said in Acts 14.

46:49

The problem for Hume was that he was just not willing even to consider the possibility that God answered the world's reliability.

46:59

Well, Ted, guess what? You have won the two -volume work on suffering in the

47:07

Christian life by our guest today, Dr. Mark Talbot. Volume 1 being

47:14

When the Stars Disappear, Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture, and Volume 2 being

47:19

Give Me Understanding that I May Live, situating our suffering within God's redemptive plan.

47:25

Make sure you get to us your full mailing address in Moundville, Alabama, and keep listening to the program and spreading word about the program down south and beyond.

47:38

Perhaps you could also just unpack the titles you have chosen and the significance of those actual phrases,

47:48

When the Stars Disappear, and Give Me Understanding that I May Live. Sure.

47:54

When the Stars Disappear is taken from what happened to Paul, as Luke recounts it, in Acts 27 and 28, when he was journeying to Rome to appear before Caesar, you'll remember that, of course, he ended up in an absolutely horrible storm at sea.

48:13

For two weeks, they didn't even eat. They had to lighten the boat by throwing virtually everything overboard.

48:22

They were worried about running aground in the middle of the

48:28

Mediterranean. There's a sandbar. If they had run into that, they would have all perished.

48:35

And everyone had lost all hope when God appeared to Paul at night in a dream and said that as long as everyone stayed on board, as long as everyone stayed on board, he would, in fact, appear in Rome to Caesar and everyone else would be safe.

48:55

And so my initial picture here, Chris, is that suffering, this goes along with what we were saying at the beginning of the program, suffering, and particularly what we could consider to be profound suffering, generally means that we lose our orientation.

49:13

And we quite often find ourselves then questioning, well, is there a

49:18

God, or how could God be good if this happens? How could he be almighty if this happens?

49:25

That's when the stars disappear. Now, what these two volumes do, and there are two more volumes in the series, what these two volumes do is they try to talk about first the orientation we all need according to our personal stories.

49:42

And so all of us make sense of life by a personal story, which has to do with I was born in such and such a time in such and such a place with such and such parents.

49:53

It includes all the things that have happened to us up until now. It includes what we hope for in the future.

50:01

Without a personal story, it is not possible to live a satisfying life.

50:11

And so we all need such a story. But then here's the really important point that ties to the second volume, give me understanding that I may live, situating our suffering within God's redemptive plan.

50:24

We all also rely on a general story. Now, right now in our time, there are basically two general stories on offer.

50:34

There's the naturalistic story that a lot of the intelligentsia of our time believe, which is that we have come about by means of completely unguided evolution that there is no purpose to life whatsoever, that at some point, the usable energy in the universe will all be used up and you'll end up with this kind of just homogenous, massive stuff.

51:05

There will be no people. There will be nothing that is important left. That's the naturalistic story.

51:13

I call that the bottom -up story. There's a top -down story, and the top -down story that I'm dealing with, of course, is the

51:20

Christian story. And it's the story of the fact that there's a God who deliberately, for good reason, in fact,

51:28

I take it that God the Father so loved God the Son that He wanted to create for God the

51:35

Son a people who would owe Him everything and therefore would worship

51:41

Him eternally. God the Father wanting to create that people for God the

51:47

Son in fact created the world and created the world to be a particular kind of place where we were in fact to image

51:57

Him in various ways. But then He gave a command, a prohibition in chapter 2 of Genesis, which is, of every tree in the garden you may freely eat.

52:07

In other words, Adam, run around the whole garden, taste every fruit. I'm commanding you to get joy out of them, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat.

52:18

For the day that you eat thereof, you'll die. That prohibition was actually

52:24

God's way of inviting Adam and Eve to commit their whole selves to Him.

52:33

In fact, we've got to pick up where you left off there because we have to go to our midway break. Folks, if you want to ask a question, send it in right now to chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

52:45

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Please be patient with us.

52:50

This is the longer than normal break in the middle of the show because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

52:55

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break so that they can air their own public service announcements and other local things that localize

53:05

Iron Trump and Zion to Lake City, Florida, geographically, which is a requirement of the

53:11

FCC. While they do that, we, on the other hand, simultaneously air our globally heard commercials.

53:17

Please try to respond to our advertisers as frequently as possible and to further ensure you do that, write down the information that they provide in their advertisements as far as contact information.

53:30

If you can't buy their products, use their services, or visit their churches, please at the very least contact our advertisers and thank them for sponsoring the show.

53:39

If, indeed, you love the show and are grateful that there are people who love the show enough that they share some of the money that God has blessed them with with us, please thank them and also send in your question to Dr.

53:51

Mark Talbot to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages.

54:09

Attention all men in ministry leadership. You're all invited to my friend Chris Arnson's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon Thursday, September 22, 11 a .m.

54:20

to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania featuring me,

54:25

James White of Alpha Omega Ministries, your keynote speaker. Not only will you enjoy a wonderful time of fellowship with your colleagues in ministry over a delicious meal, but you'll also receive dozens of free brand new books donated by Christian publishers all over the

54:40

United States and the United Kingdom personally selected by Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

54:46

So if you're a pastor, an elder, a deacon, a parachurch leader, or any other man in ministry leadership, please register for the

54:54

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon today by calling 631 -291 -7002.

55:04

631 -291 -7002 or by visiting ironsharpensironradio .com

55:12

ironsharpensironradio .com This is James White of Alpha Omega Ministries hoping to see you

55:17

Thursday, September 22nd, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania for Chris Arnson's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon.

55:45

I'm Dr. Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

55:55

Every Christian who's serious about the Deformed Faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the

56:05

Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity by Dr. Joseph Moorcraft.

56:12

It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism. It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.

56:23

Dr. Moorcraft is Pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia. And I urge everyone looking for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.

56:35

For details on the eight -volume commentary go to westminstercommentary .com westminstercommentary .com

56:42

For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com

56:51

heritagepresbyterianchurch .com Please tell Dr. Moorcraft and the saints at Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia that Dr.

56:59

Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sent you. Anchored in Truth Ministries is the mission arm of Grace Life Church of the

57:15

Shoals. Based in Alabama, it supports missionaries in over 13 countries around the world.

57:26

Anchored in Truth is in partnership with 36 church plants as well as radio stations, theological seminaries, and various programs for unreached people groups.

57:37

With an aim to glorify God and reach the nations with the gospel, it is a blessing to see how

57:44

God has used Anchored in Truth in so many different contexts globally as well as locally.

57:52

To find out more about this vital work worldwide, visit anchoredintruth .org

58:07

James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here. If you've watched my Dividing Line webcast often enough, you know

58:12

I have a great love for getting Bibles and other documents vital to my ministry rebound to preserve and ensure their longevity.

58:20

And besides that, they feel so good. I'm so delighted I discovered post -Tenebrous Lux Bible rebinding.

58:27

No radio ad will be long enough to sing their praises sufficiently, but I'll give it a shot. Jeffrey Rice of post -Tenebrous

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Lux is a remarkably gifted craftsman and artisan. All his work is done by hand from the cutting to the pleating of corners to the perimeter stitching.

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Jeffrey uses the finest and buttery soft imported leathers in a wide variety of gorgeous colors like the turquoise goat skin tanned in Italy used for my

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French tannery used to rebind a Reformation study Bible I used as a gift. The silver gilding he added on the page edges has a stunning mirror finish resembling highly polished chrome.

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Jeffrey will customize your rebinding to your specifications and even emboss your logo into the leather making whatever he rebinds a one -of -a -kind work of art.

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For more details on post -Tenebrous Lux Bible rebinding go to PTLBibleRebinding .com

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That's PTLBibleRebinding .com Linbrook Baptist Church on 225

59:41

Earl Avenue in Linbrook, Long Island is teaching God's timeless truths in the 21st century. Our church is far more than a

59:47

Sunday worship service. It's a place of learning where the scriptures are studied and the preaching of the gospel is clear and relevant.

59:53

It's like a gym where one can exercise their faith through community involvement. It's like a hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people and healing.

01:00:01

We're a diverse family of all ages. Enthusiastically serving our Lord Jesus Christ in fellowship, play, and together.

01:00:07

Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman and I invite you to come and join us here at Linbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.

01:00:13

Call Linbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402 or visit linbrookbaptist .org

01:00:23

That's linbrookbaptist .org Every day at thousands of community centers, high schools, middle schools, juvenile institutions, coffee shops, and local hangouts,

01:00:38

Long Island Youth for Christ staff and volunteers meet with young people who need Jesus. We are rural and urban and we are always about the message of Jesus.

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Our mission is to have a noticeable spiritual impact on Long Island, New York by engaging young people in the lifelong journey of following Christ.

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Long Island Youth for Christ has been a stalwart bedrock ministry since 1959. We have a world -class staff and a proven track record of bringing consistent love and encouragement to youths in need all over the country and around the world.

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Help honor our history by becoming a part of our future. Volunteer, donate, pray, or all of the above.

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For details, call Long Island Youth for Christ at 631 -385 -8333 that's 631 -385 -8333 or visit liyfc .org

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that's liyfc .org Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing 6th grade.

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Do you know what they all have in common? They all require training, assessments, and certifications. But do you know what requires no training at all?

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Becoming a parent. My name is A .M. Brewster. I'm the president of Truth, Love, Parent and host of its award -winning podcast.

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I've been a biblical family counselor since the early 2000s and what I've discovered is that the majority of Christian parents have never been biblically equipped to do the work of the ministry in their homes.

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That's why Truth, Love, Parent exists. We serve God by equipping dads and moms to be the ambassador parents

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Please visit us at truthloveparent .com Why can't we see

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God? How do we know we picked the right Bible? Why do we go to church on Sunday?

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Parents, if your kids have questions about God's word and His creation, they would love to read our new reformed magazine called

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Created by a team of teachers, ministers, mothers, fathers, and more, we know how important it is to have

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Learn more information and subscribe now at ignitedbytheword .org and receive your first two issues free.

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It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the Iron Trouper and Zion Radio audience have been sticking with or switching to the

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NASB. I'm Pastor Nate Pickowitz of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmont and Ironworks, New Hampshire, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Rich Jensen of Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Quorum, New York, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Sule Prince of Oakwood, Wesleyan Church in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor John Sampson of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Chuck Volo of New Life Community Church in Kingsville, Maryland, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Steve Herford of East Fort Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Roy Owens Jr. of the

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Church in Friendship in Hockley, Texas, and the NASB is my Bible of choice.

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Here's a great way for your church to help keep Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air. Pastors, are your pew

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Go to nasbible .com. That's nasbible .com to place your order.

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Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said, Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read.

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He who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

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You need to read. Solid Ground Christian Books is a publisher and book distributor who takes these words of the

01:05:46

Prince of Preachers to heart. The mission of Solid Ground Christian Books is to bring back treasures of the past to minister to Christians in the present and future, and to publish new titles that address burning issues in the church and the world.

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Since its beginning in 2001, Solid Ground has been committed to publish God -centered,

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That's solid -ground -books .com and see what priceless literary gems from the past to present you can unearth from Solid Ground.

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And once again,

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I thank Mike Gaydosh, the founder and director of Solid Ground Christian Books for introducing me to my guest today,

01:06:35

Dr. Mark Talbot. Remember folks, always make solid -ground -books .com

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your very first stop for all your gift -giving needs, whether it is a gift for a brother or sister in Christ or a gift for a lost loved one, which is equally important.

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Why not give a gift that has eternal consequence? Go to solid -ground -books .com

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today and always mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:07:06

Before I return to my guest, Dr. Mark Talbot, and our discussion on Suffering and the

01:07:12

Christian Life, I just have a couple more announcements to make. Please folks, if you love this show, we are in urgent need of your financial support.

01:07:20

Go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click support, then click click to donate now, and you can donate instantly with a debit or credit card.

01:07:28

If you prefer snail mail, there will be a physical address that appears on your screen as well where you can mail checks made payable to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio when you click support at ironsharpensironradio .com.

01:07:41

If you want to advertise with us, as long as whatever it is you are promoting is compatible with what I believe, you don't have to agree with me on everything identically, but you need to be at the very least promote something that is compatible with what

01:07:54

I believe, we'll send in your inquiry to chrisarnzen at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line.

01:08:01

I would love to help you launch an ad campaign because we are in urgent need of your advertising dollars as well.

01:08:06

And keep in mind, folks, when donating, never cut into the financial amount that you are accustomed to giving your own church where you are a member in order to bless

01:08:19

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially. Please never do that. In other words, don't give your church less money to give us a financial gift.

01:08:27

Also, if you're really struggling to survive, please wait till you're more financially stable and back on your feet before you give us a financial gift.

01:08:35

Those two things are commands of God in scripture providing for your church and your family.

01:08:42

Providing for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is obviously not a command of God in scripture. But if you love this show and you don't want it to disappear and you are financially blessed above and beyond your ability to provide for church and family, you have extra money collecting interest in the bank, you have extra money for benevolent and recreational and trivial purposes.

01:09:04

Well, please share some of that money with us. If indeed, you love the show and don't want it to go off the air, go to ironsharpensironradio .com,

01:09:12

click support, then click click to donate now. Also, folks, I want you to be aware of an important event that's coming up.

01:09:21

No doubt, most of our listeners are aware of a notorious false teacher named

01:09:27

Joel Osteen. Well, he's going to be, unfortunately, speaking at Yankee Stadium in Bronx, New York this

01:09:35

Saturday The good news is Soul Fishing Ministries is going to be having a gathering there at Yankee Stadium to hand out tracts and to be a witness for the true gospel of Jesus Christ at that event.

01:09:49

And if you're interested in being a part of that, go to soulfishingministries .org soulfishingministries .org

01:09:56

and click events. And I hope that you can attend and be a part of that work to help those dedicated brothers and sisters to have the good news in truth and love be present there during the event held by a very dangerous false teacher.

01:10:16

And last but not least, if you are not a member of a Christ -honoring, biblically sound, theologically solid church, no matter where you live on the planet

01:10:26

Earth, I may be able to help you find a church as I've already done with many people spanning the globe in the

01:10:32

Iron Trip and Zion Radio audience. So send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com

01:10:37

and put I need a church in the subject line. And I may be able to help you or someone you love find a church even within minutes of your home,

01:10:45

God willing, as I have done many times before. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr.

01:10:55

Mark Talbot, chrisarnson at gmail .com. We are talking about suffering in the Christian life. Please give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence, and only remain anonymous if the question involves a personal and private matter.

01:11:09

And Dr. Talbot, right before our midway break, you were discussing the

01:11:14

Garden of Eden, a tree of the knowledge of good and evil and so forth. So why don't you, if you have anything further to say,

01:11:21

I wanted to make sure I did not cut you off. Well, in fact, I was going to go on, Chris, and make clear that the top -down story, the

01:11:28

Christian story, has four parts to it, creation, rebellion, redemption, and consummation.

01:11:37

And I would suggest that most Christians don't know that whole story well enough.

01:11:43

That is, as Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew put it, the true story of the whole world.

01:11:54

And ultimately, our personal stories, as I'm talking about in my first volume, our personal stories fit somewhere within a general story.

01:12:07

And, of course, naturalists think that the general story is that there's no judgment, there's no God. That, of course, is relieving to them generally.

01:12:16

Christians recognize that there is judgment, that there is a God, that we need to be right with Him through Christ Jesus.

01:12:23

Knowing the full Christian story means that then our personal stories can begin to align our personal stories with God's general story in such a way that we carry out

01:12:38

His calling for us in this world. Praise God.

01:12:43

We do have a listener, and I believe it's a first -time listener, Debbie from Hoshton, Georgia, and I hope

01:12:52

I'm pronouncing that correctly, H -O -S -C -H -T -O -N. She says,

01:12:58

Ezekiel 24, verse 16, states that he received word from the

01:13:04

Lord that he would lose his wife, but he was not to weep or mourn.

01:13:10

He was prepared by the Lord. We are not. Can we learn from this that there is no purposeless suffering that we have to endure?

01:13:19

I think so. It seems to me that nothing falls out of God's hand.

01:13:25

Now, Ecclesiastes, the preacher in Ecclesiastes, his burden is to make clear that we can't always figure out the why for why we are suffering in a given situation.

01:13:41

Calvin was willing to say that while God, in fact, providentially orders everything and has ordered everything from eternity past, that to us, a fair amount of what happens can seem as if it is mere fortune or chance, but it's not.

01:14:00

Ultimately, God is... His hand is in all the suffering that's in the world, and what

01:14:08

Christians can be sure of, given passages like Romans 5, 3 through 5, and the 2nd through 4th verses of the first chapter of James, what

01:14:19

Christians can be sure of is that if they remain faithful,

01:14:24

God will, in their suffering, help them to grow in their faith in important ways that then allow them, actually, to be witnesses to others, too.

01:14:38

Well, Debbie, thank you so much for your question, and guess what? You are also receiving both

01:14:44

Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Dr. Mark Talbott's books on Christian and the

01:14:50

Suffering Life. Please give us your full mailing address in Hoshton, Georgia, so that Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service can ship those two volumes out to you.

01:15:00

That's cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. We not only thank Crossway for providing a limited number of this two -volume set for our listeners who send in questions, but we also want to thank cvbbs .com

01:15:16

for actually shipping them out to our winners so it spares Iron Trump and Zion Radio of any expense.

01:15:23

Thank you very much, Debbie, and keep listening to Iron Trump and Zion Radio. We have an anonymous listener who says,

01:15:31

It seems that Christians fall on one far end of the spectrum in regard to suffering or the other.

01:15:40

One far end, which would be heretical, would be that they remove the sovereignty of God from the equation completely.

01:15:50

They don't think God has anything to do with the illness or accident or death of a loved one.

01:15:59

I can remember hearing a famous Word of Faith Pentecostal preacher saying exactly that on television, saying that it is ridiculous and blasphemous to accuse

01:16:12

God of being in any way involved in those things. On the other end of the spectrum, you have those that think they can, with precision and with certainty, the reasons why

01:16:26

God has inflicted others with pain and sorrow and suffering, including they might be in a city where homosexuality is prevalent or any host of reasons that they think they know

01:16:40

God has brought suffering upon these people for those reasons. Don't you think that this is, or should

01:16:49

I say, these are two very heretical extremes? I think that that's right.

01:16:55

I appreciate the way that the question has been formulated and making clear that there are these two sides of, we could say, the log that one can fall off.

01:17:06

It seems to me that the scriptural position is that indeed, as I said, nothing falls outside, out of God's hand, but that we often cannot assign the reason why someone suffers in a particular way.

01:17:25

The author of Ecclesiastes mentions twice that he has seen righteous people who got what the wicked deserved, and he's seen wicked people who got what the righteous deserved, and of course it was the fault of Job's friends.

01:17:41

After having spent a week doing what they should have, just sitting with him and not speaking to him, it was the fault of Job's friends to try to assign what was going wrong in his life, which was accounting for his suffering.

01:17:55

And so I think as Christians we need to be really careful here. Among other things, it seems to me, as we were talking right at the beginning of the program,

01:18:03

Chris, that when someone first encounters profound suffering, that we need to be careful that we do not offer answers quickly and answers that will strike those who are suffering as being superficial.

01:18:22

It seems to me that often our first business is just to sit with people who are suffering, to give them time, sometimes over months, to start to articulate how the suffering is affecting them.

01:18:42

And we pray during all of that time that the Holy Spirit will give us insight in being able to speak to them in ways that will help them to realize that God, in fact, has not abandoned them.

01:18:55

Anonymous, please email me your full name and mailing address.

01:19:01

Obviously that information will not be divulged on the air. But if you'd like to win this two -volume set on Christian and the

01:19:09

Suffering Life by Dr. Mark Talbott, email me your name and your full mailing address and CVVBS .com

01:19:17

will ship those two books out to you. I forgot to mention to Debbie in Hoshton, Georgia, if you are a first -time listener, you will also be receiving a free, brand -new copy of the

01:19:30

New American Standard Bible, on top of receiving the two volumes by Dr. Talbott. So that's an added treat.

01:19:36

If you're a first -time questioner, I'm sorry, I said if you're a first -time listener, there are many first -time questioners who have been listening to the show for years and have never asked a question before.

01:19:45

So I've made that correction there. The question that the anonymous person asked is very intriguing because it always is a mystery to me why there are

01:20:00

Christians who get angry when you talk about God's sovereignty over all things, including tragedies and a crisis and a trial in someone's life and a death and so on.

01:20:14

They want to find comfort in believing that God just sat there as an observer and an eyewitness but it was in no way involved.

01:20:24

I just don't even understand. I mean, I don't want you to impugn motives to somebody, but can you even guess why

01:20:32

Christians would find comfort in that? Or at least try to find comfort in that? Well, when

01:20:38

I was in college, Chris, I spent almost two years trying to figure out why

01:20:45

I had had the accident I had. A couple of years with this,

01:20:53

I've learned everything I can learn. Of course, I hadn't learned everything

01:20:59

I could learn from it by a long shot, but I didn't know it. I spent a couple of years trying to understand why he didn't, and I came up with what is known as the free will defense, which is, in fact, what

01:21:12

Alvin Plantinga, a great Christian philosopher, and the sorts of people that you're talking about tend to come up with, where they want to say that ultimately, the suffering that is in the world is to be attributed to what human beings do that's wrong.

01:21:31

Now, in one sense, that's true in the sense that there would be no human suffering if it weren't for our first parents,

01:21:38

Adam and Eve, having rebelled against God by having eaten from the forbidden tree, but with regard to the relationship between God's sovereignty and our freedom, the biblical view is actually that somehow, although we cannot explain it, both of those are true.

01:22:00

We are responsible, and God is completely sovereign. And we can't explain it in the same way that we can't explain the

01:22:08

Trinity or the Incarnation. If anybody claims to give a complete explanation of the

01:22:15

Trinity that gets rid of any sense of the puzzle being beyond us or of the

01:22:24

Incarnation, they're going to be giving you something that's heretical. And it's actually the same with regard to God's sovereignty and our free will.

01:22:34

Somehow, those two things are both true in such a way that we are held accountable, and yet nothing happens that God, in fact, doesn't ordain from time immemorial in the past.

01:22:50

Now, I am guessing you would agree with me. I don't know this for certain, but just for clarification,

01:22:56

I'm fairly certain that you would believe there are certain minimum requirements of belief for an understanding of the

01:23:07

Trinity to be biblical and orthodox. In other words, I'm sure you wouldn't say that you can believe anything you want about the

01:23:16

Trinity or somebody has a modalist description of the Trinity that they're wrong or are tritheistic.

01:23:23

Right. You're right, Chris. The reason the great creeds got worked out is because the great creeds keep us from asserting something that we shouldn't assert with regard to the

01:23:37

Trinity, the incarnation, but they don't give us the positive explanation of those things.

01:23:45

Right. We, as finite, puny humans, can never say, I know the mind of God and I can completely understand all things about him.

01:23:55

That would make you God if you made such a claim accurately. That's right.

01:24:01

That's right. Think of Job. Job wants his day in court before God. He thinks that if he gets it, that he's going to be able to show that God is in the wrong in the way that he's been treating him.

01:24:12

When God shows up, God shows up in a whirlwind, which is a sign probably of his anger.

01:24:18

He doesn't address Job's suffering at all. He starts to ask him questions about creation and finally

01:24:27

Job gets it. He realizes that if he can't answer these questions that God is asking him, that in fact there are any number of things that he can't understand and he simply must trust

01:24:39

God. And going back again to that question by the anonymous listener,

01:24:46

I just want to clarify something in that I don't know with certainty the intent of the question or all things that he or she had in his or her mind.

01:24:58

But it's one thing to wrongly state as if you know the mind of God with certainty why a tornado or hurricane or flood destroyed a city and countless thousands of lives were lost.

01:25:19

And it would be wrong to say that you know that that happened because there are so many homosexuals living in that city.

01:25:27

Because sometimes when comments have been made like that, there have been churches, true solid biblical churches that have been destroyed too.

01:25:35

So there's one thing to make that kind of a claim. But on the other hand, you may know someone who is dying of AIDS.

01:25:44

You may know somebody who is even suffering with monkey pox, which apparently is something that is nearly exclusively if not completely exclusively a disease that male homosexuals experience.

01:25:59

But obviously you can, when having a moment of conversation, when you're giving the gospel in truth and with love and with compassion and tenderness, you can bring up about the fact that these very things that they're experiencing are fruits of their disobedience, can't you?

01:26:22

Yes, we certainly can. Interestingly enough, in Africa, monkey pox, if I'm right, is not primarily a disease that's spread among same -sex people.

01:26:32

And the same thing with AIDS, interestingly enough. That's right. But in the

01:26:37

United States right now, they say that that in fact is so. It seems to me that we need to recognize that sin has its consequences and that various kinds of sins have various kinds of consequences, such as if I had not been the kind of risk taker that I was when

01:26:56

I was 17, where I liked to do things that were scary, I probably would not have been on that rope swing because it was so big and I probably would have never had the accident that I had.

01:27:07

And so we need to recognize that what happens to an individual person may very well be explicable, but we need to be careful that we don't assume that we're going to be able to find that in every case and that we're going to be able to identify for people what their sin is.

01:27:29

That's exactly what Job's friends tried to do and couldn't do. We have another anonymous listener who says,

01:27:37

Is it ever appropriate in the midst of suffering to argue with God and declare your anger with Him?

01:27:44

Very good question. I have known people who, when something really awful has happened to them, they have just quit praying.

01:27:56

And what I tell them is that God knows their hearts and He knows if they're angry with Him.

01:28:03

If you go through the Psalms of Lament and the Book of Psalms, you'll find that the

01:28:10

Psalmists at times clearly overstate or state in terms that don't fit their situation what's happening to them.

01:28:19

So quite a few of them will say, Look at God, I'm drowning here. But it's quite obvious that they can't be drowning because they're not around water.

01:28:27

So God allows us, in order to express how much something hurts, how much something is bothering us,

01:28:37

He allows us to overstate at times exactly what it's like.

01:28:44

And He, for those who are Christians, as our loving Father, is willing to overlook that and to forgive it.

01:28:52

But better to continue talking to Him than to shut down the conversation.

01:28:58

With Jeremiah, Jeremiah, I think, went awfully close to too far in chapter 20 of his book and what he accused

01:29:08

God of. But if he hadn't done that, I am not sure that he could have made clear to God just how awful his life was.

01:29:19

Here was a man who was not allowed to marry, who had only four people who helped him in his entire lifetime, who his family and everybody else hated because of the message that he had.

01:29:32

God had in fact told him early on that this was going to be his ministry.

01:29:37

But in chapter 20, he hadn't realized how bad it was going to be. And so he blurts out to God this bit, you deceived me,

01:29:46

I allowed you to deceive me, and all this stuff. And yet God didn't abandon him.

01:29:54

So it is right at times to express our anger to God. But we need to be careful when we do it.

01:30:00

We need to be sure that as we do it, insofar as we can, we say, Lord, help me to understand what is happening here in a way where I am not unreasonably or blasphemous.

01:30:16

Yes, and if we fall into that, we need to repent. We need to cry out to God for mercy after having slandered him or used his name blasphemy and anger.

01:30:26

Yes. C .S. Lewis in A Grief Observed gets really angry with God.

01:30:32

And one morning after he had gotten really, really angry with God about losing his wife, he said, feelings, feelings, feelings.

01:30:40

Let me try to reason about this stuff for a while. And what he did was he said, you know, there's nothing different between what's happened to me and losing my wife and what has happened to other people.

01:30:51

It's just that until I lost my wife, I wasn't aware of whether or not

01:30:57

I really believed that God was behind all things and would make them right in the end.

01:31:08

And so sometimes what we need to do is we need to slow down and say, okay, now, is this a reasonable reaction out of me or does

01:31:17

Scripture actually tell me that things like this happen and I shouldn't be quite so shocked?

01:31:23

Amen. I was wondering what you think of this quote. I don't know if you've heard it before, but after I tell you, perhaps you can reflect on it.

01:31:33

It's one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite heroes of the faith, the 19th century

01:31:40

Anglican bishop J .C. Ryle. And he has a booklet that I believe is an excerpt from The Upper Room or one of his other larger works.

01:31:51

But he has a booklet that at least publishers make available as a booklet, including

01:31:57

Chapel Library, called Sickness. And one of the most profound sentences

01:32:04

I remember reading in that booklet by J .C.

01:32:10

Ryle was, Jesus was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. None have such an opportunity of learning the mind of a suffering

01:32:19

Savior than suffering disciples. That hit me profoundly when

01:32:25

I first read it and I continue to repeat it to others. And I was wondering if you think that that is a valuable thing we should cling to when suffering, that we are learning something of a suffering

01:32:40

Savior, even though His suffering is infinitely beyond that we can even imagine.

01:32:47

I mean, the wrath of His Father poured upon Him. Right. Some people, when they think...

01:32:53

His suffering was of an entirely different quality any human being could have. But He also did suffer physically on the cross and so on.

01:33:02

Right, right. Although, when I read the New Testament, I think that probably the Apostle Paul suffered more physically and so on and so forth than our

01:33:11

Lord did on the cross because with the Apostle Paul it went on for a lifetime after he became a

01:33:16

Christian. Five whippings, which would have left scar tissue over his chest and back that would have made it hard to breathe.

01:33:24

Three beatings with rods, all those kinds of things. The catalog of what happened to Paul as he puts it in 2

01:33:30

Corinthians 11 is remarkable. But I think you're right. And in fact,

01:33:36

I had a friend who just said this to me the other day. She's getting up in years. She's in her 80s.

01:33:42

And she's got all sorts of aches and pains. And she said, it has finally struck me that by means of this,

01:33:50

God is making me more like my Savior. And I think that's exactly right.

01:33:57

Amen. By the way, I just got some very good news from that first -time questioner,

01:34:04

Debbie in Hoshton, Georgia. She said that she just placed four subscription orders yesterday for the magazine

01:34:13

Ignited by the Word. I really appreciate that, Debbie. And I hope that the magazine blesses you as you seek to minister to children.

01:34:21

And I also hope that you told the publishers of the magazine that you heard about them from Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:34:28

And I would urge you, if you did not do that, to make sure that they know that was your source of discovering

01:34:35

Ignited by the Word magazine. Thank you so much. And keep your eye out in the mail for this two -volume set by Dr.

01:34:44

Talbot on suffering and also the New American Standard Bible. There was another thing that I can't remember who mentioned it.

01:34:53

Either it was one of our listeners or you. But isn't it...

01:35:01

It seems to be true that those who trust in the sovereignty of God, those who believe that He is in control of all things, are the only

01:35:14

Christians who consistently and in a logical fashion that reflects their theology, believe that there is purpose in suffering.

01:35:24

And if you were to deny God's sovereign control over all things, you would have to believe it is purposeless, that you would have to believe that it is happenstance, and so on.

01:35:36

Which is an alternative that I can't even comprehend of embracing.

01:35:45

I could not find any hope in that. Happenstance, suffering.

01:35:50

But anyway, you could share what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right,

01:35:55

Chris. What it comes to is that if we understand creation, which is the reason why the first chapter in my second book is on creation, we understand that God created everything out of nothing, by His Word.

01:36:09

And all of the causal regularities we see in the world are then both created by Him and held in place by Him, which means that none of them are such that they are more powerful than He is.

01:36:28

Which means that with anything that happens in this life, ultimately, there can be an explanation quite often in terms of the causal regularities.

01:36:38

So, I fall somewhere around 50 feet off a rope, it breaks my back. That's understandable.

01:36:43

But at the same time, that happening is something that God ordained from eternity past.

01:36:50

And the two things are true at the same time. And because they're true at the same time, whenever we suffer,

01:36:58

I think what we're supposed to do is to look up and start to pray and ask

01:37:04

God to help us to see why we are suffering in the way that we are.

01:37:10

Now, we have to be careful that when people are in profound suffering, we don't give them little answers as the lessons that God is trying to teach them.

01:37:20

But I can't think of a kind of suffering I've been through that, in fact,

01:37:26

I didn't learn later prepared me for being able to minister to someone else.

01:37:34

And in fact, that's one of the main reasons I think that we suffer. And it's that we learn through our suffering.

01:37:41

This is what Paul says in the first chapter of 2 Corinthians. We learn through our suffering how

01:37:48

God has encouraged and cared for us by means of His Holy Spirit. And then we can encourage and care for anyone else, no matter what their kind of suffering is.

01:38:00

And so, when people are suffering, I often say, if you're feeling as if your life is meaningless and you don't understand this, as soon as you can, get to the place that you can minister to someone else because of your suffering, and that will make it redemptive.

01:38:18

Amen. And we should always remember as Christians that when we minister to anyone who's suffering, whether they are saved or lost, that the

01:38:29

Scriptures are to be applied to their circumstances as a soothing balm and not a frying pan to their skull.

01:38:38

And the difference could all be in the manner and the tone with which we say the truths of Scripture.

01:38:45

That's right. That's right. And sometimes what we need to say to people who are not saved yet or to people who have done something that they really shouldn't do as Christians, we need to say, this is understandable in terms of breaking some of God's laws, but we say that in a way that's redemptive, and we don't say it as if we haven't been in the same situation.

01:39:08

We recognize that we are sinners and that some of our suffering has come out of our specific sins, even if we can't explain all of it that way.

01:39:18

In fact, I want to pick up on something that you just said there when we return from our final break. This is a break that is a lot shorter than the last break that you experienced.

01:39:29

So if you do have a question, please send it in immediately before we run out of time.

01:39:35

We are approaching the end of our program today. So send in your question to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:39:41

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away.

01:39:47

We'll be right back. I said, oh, make it time, make it time.

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Gospel, they created a beautiful, perfect facsimile of the genealogy of Jesus Christ from the original engravings contained in a first edition 1611

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King James Bible. This 17th century hand -engraved chart shows the family tree of Jesus Christ going back to Adam and Eve.

01:47:55

This book is complete with gorgeous, full -size illustrations of Noah's Ark and the

01:48:01

Tower of Babel and an explanation of why the genealogy of Jesus is so important for his claims to the throne of the universe.

01:48:10

Originals of this work are in museums and nobody has ever made it accessible to the public in a large book form before.

01:48:19

You can have your own copy of this 44 -page genealogy book for a donation of $35 or more.

01:48:26

Visit historicalbiblesociety .org That's historicalbiblesociety .org

01:48:34

Thanks for helping to keep Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio on the air. This is

01:48:49

Pastor Bill Sousa of Grace Church at Franklin here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

01:48:55

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio financially.

01:49:04

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

01:49:16

Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, the end for which we strive is the glory of God.

01:49:23

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

01:49:36

Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

01:49:46

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org That's gracechurchatfranklin .org

01:49:53

This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our

01:50:00

Sovereign Lord, God, Savior, and King Jesus Christ today and always.

01:50:08

And this is just another reminder to all men and ministry leadership, don't forget about next month's

01:50:15

Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio Pastor's Luncheon featuring world -renowned scholar and theologian

01:50:20

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries as our keynote speaker. That's Thursday, September 22, 11 a .m.

01:50:26

to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania. All men and ministry leadership are welcome and if you could send in your registration by e -mail, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com

01:50:38

chrisarnson at gmail .com I hope to see you there. Before the break,

01:50:44

Dr. Talbot, I was mentioning that you said something that resonated with me.

01:50:50

Almost every time I have discussed the topic of suffering on the show, it will be made apparent by either a guest or even myself that we have to be very careful about telling somebody,

01:51:06

I know how you feel. And there's a difference between saying, well, let me tell you about my life and the fact that I've lost my wife in death or that I have cancer or you could go on and on with different sufferings you've experienced.

01:51:26

And by the way, folks, I am not suffering with cancer right now. I wanted to make that clear. I was using that as an example.

01:51:32

Although I have lost my wife, as I've mentioned many times on the program, isn't there a difference between blessing others by helping to comfort them knowing that perhaps we have gone through serious trials in our lives that are similar, but to tell somebody that you know how they feel, even if they've experienced nearly an identical trial in their life, people react to those things differently.

01:52:02

People are individuals and we can't say to somebody, I know how you feel.

01:52:08

Am I right on that? I think you're exactly right, Chris. It seems to me that our business is to do what we think will help people to be able to endure their suffering because as we find out in the book of Hebrews, that's ultimately what we have to do.

01:52:28

We have to endure our suffering and quite often we do that by talking about some horrible experience that we've been through where perhaps we, for a period of time, had all the stars disappear, we couldn't make sense of life, but then we realized that God was there with us all along.

01:52:46

Well, I'd like you to summarize what you most want our listeners to remember, what you most want etched in their hearts and minds before we leave this program today.

01:52:56

I want them to think about the fact that they have a personal story that makes meaning of their own lives and then there is a general story which gives us the meaning of human life.

01:53:10

The true general story is the Christian story. If we don't know that story in some detail, we cannot align our personal stories with the story that God indeed is telling and we will not be effective witnesses.

01:53:28

Amen. And as a last reminder, this seems like a no -brainer, but people often don't do what

01:53:37

I'm going to say. If you know somebody who is suffering for any number of reasons, you don't have to go over to their home and start pontificating like a theologian.

01:53:48

Bring them dinner or bring them out to dinner or bring them a gift of some kind.

01:53:56

Give them a note. Give them a call just to say, I love you and I'm thinking about you and praying for you.

01:54:02

Isn't that something that is incredibly powerful, far more than one might think, even if it's just a simple gift or a simple word of encouragement?

01:54:12

How far that can go in mending a broken heart. Yes. Exactly, Chris. And things like notes are particularly important because a person can read that and if they want to respond, they can, but they don't have to and yet they know that you're thinking of them.

01:54:29

I want to, once again, make sure that our listeners have all the information they need to get a hold of everything that you have available in ministry for them.

01:54:43

Once again, we have this two -volume set on suffering and the

01:54:51

Christian life published by Crossway. Volume one and two.

01:54:57

Volume one is When the Stars Disappear, Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture and volume two,

01:55:05

Give Me Understanding That I May Live, Situating Our Suffering Within God's Redemptive Plan.

01:55:11

I would urge you, those of you that have not been fortunate enough to win copies today, or even if you've won copies and you want to buy additional sets for others in your life,

01:55:23

I would urge you to get them from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service who carries nearly all of Crossway's titles since Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service sponsors this show.

01:55:34

Their website is cvbbs .com C for Cumberland, V for Valley, B for Bible, B for Book, and S for service .com

01:55:45

cvbbs .com Also, if you want to listen to the podcast that is hosted by our guest,

01:55:55

Mark Talbot, When the Stars Disappear, Probing Human Suffering and Applying Truth to Life's Most Crucial Questions, you can go to whenthestarsdisappear .com

01:56:09

whenthestarsdisappear .com Do you have any other kind of contact information or information about a special event or anything that you want to inform our listeners about?

01:56:21

They can go to christianscholarsfund .org and a fair number of my writings and some videos are there.

01:56:30

I'm a scholar for christianscholarsfund .org and they find more of my stuff there.

01:56:37

Great. And once again, I want to remind our listeners, please, if you haven't already, renew your subscription if you've already subscribed or subscribe for the first time to Ignited by the

01:56:50

Word magazine, one of our largest sponsors, whose advertising contract is up for renewal in just about two weeks.

01:56:58

We hope to get that renewal because we really depend upon the finances that come from those subscriptions and from those advertisements.

01:57:08

Also, I want to, for those of you who haven't already heard, the publishers of the

01:57:14

New American Standard Bible have renewed their contract. And please, as the ad reminds you every day, if you are in a position of authority in your church, whether you're a deacon or an elder, a pastor, have the ear of those folks.

01:57:30

Please try to see if your church can replace your Pew Bibles with New American Standard Bibles and make sure that you tell the publishers that you heard about them from Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

01:57:43

Go to nasbible .com, nasbible .com. I want to thank you so much,

01:57:49

Dr. Talbot, for being such an extraordinary guest and I already know that I am truly hoping that you will return soon and frequently as a guest.

01:57:58

You are extraordinary. And I hope you come back, as I said, soon and often.

01:58:04

I want to thank everybody who listened to the show, especially those who took the time to write, and especially those who are suffering right now.

01:58:11

And I want to wish you all a very safe and happy and Christ -honoring weekend and Lord's Day.

01:58:20

And I hope you all remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater Savior than you are a sinner.