None Greater (part 12)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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We're continuing on our journey again this morning as we go through None Greater by Matthew Barrett. Hope you've been enjoying it and getting a lot out of it.

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It's been really, those of you who've taken the time to talk to Andrew and I about things, we really appreciate it.

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It's to hear that a lot of you are really getting something out of this class and we are very much enjoying getting the opportunity to speak to you and share with you about how great

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God is and about all of his different attributes. So today, it's always important to take a few minutes each class as we get started to take stock of where we've been and where we're heading.

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And for some time now, when we've been dealing with the attributes of God, we've been looking at certain attributes that all have their root, maybe is the right word to say, in God's infinity or in the fact that God is infinite.

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That God is infinite means, two weeks ago, that he is eternal, that he is eternal.

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And it also means, as Andrew taught last week, that God is omnipresent, omnipresent, and that he's not bound by space.

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Now, as you can imagine, as we start talking about the divine omnis, we're not gonna stop with just omnipresence, we're gonna hit all the omnis all at once, and so this week and next,

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I will be teaching on the other three omnis, which are what? Gonna hit you with a question already at 9 .04.

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Omnipotent, omniscient, no, we already did that one. I know, it's like the redheaded stepchild fourth one that everyone forgets.

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The three that everybody remembers are omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, but there's a fourth one, kind of tied closely to omniscient.

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No, see, Daniel's not here. Daniel's the one who always reminds me of it. It's omnisapient, which essentially means that God is all wise, all wise.

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If you didn't get a handout, could you raise your hand? Andrew's got the rest of them here to pass out.

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Omnisapient, so tomorrow, next week, yeah, tomorrow, if you wanna come in. Next week, we will do omniscient and omnisapient together.

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Like I just said, they're kind of linked, all knowing and all wise, right, as you can imagine, but today, we're gonna do omnipotent, omnipotent.

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Now, I'm excited because I've finally gotten, after all this time, to an attribute that is actually named in the

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Bible. We can't find the words aseity or trinity or simplicity anywhere in the

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Bible, but we actually can find omnipotent, or at least we can in the KJV.

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In Revelation 19, six, the heavenly host is singing and they say, alleluia for the

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Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Alleluia for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and of course, that's famously included in the hallelujah chorus, and so we have heard that line quite a bit, especially at Christmastime.

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In the ESV, instead of using the word omnipotent, they use the word, in that verse, they use the word almighty, which should tell you that everywhere else in the

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ESV where you see the word almighty, I want you to be thinking omnipotent, omnipotent, and if you think about it, really, it's obviously a very similar word, right?

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Omnipotent means all -powerful, almighty, just separated out, is all -mighty, right?

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Don't read through that word too fast, that is what almighty means, is all -mighty, all the might.

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So, as usual when I do these attributes, I like to start out by sort of throwing up on the wall a few working definitions for omnipotent, and I'd love to hear if anyone has any further ideas, and we'll then sort of discuss and explore how well those working definitions work, all right, as we go.

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So, let me start out with the obvious one, so that no one says it when

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I call on them, which is omnipotent means that God is all -powerful, right? That he's all -powerful.

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Another one that we did when we were kind of doing catechism questions with our kids, and Karen and I were trying to think of a good way to explain what all -powerful even meant, was to tell the kids that God is more powerful than the sum of all power in the universe.

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God is more powerful than the sum of all power in the universe, why can we say that,

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Charlie? Right, because he's the source of all of it, right? Every power, every bit of energy that is in the universe today, and for all time, is sourced ultimately from God, from God.

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Anybody know the current estimated star count of the universe, off the top of your head?

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Who thinks it's in the billions? Charlie gave it away, who thinks it's in the trillions?

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Yeah, it's actually in the billions of trillions, it's way up there right now, in terms of every time we build a more powerful telescope, we just keep finding more, even further out than we thought we could find stars, and there they are.

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So it is, and every one of those stars is putting out a lot of energy, a lot of energy, okay?

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And yet, and we, you know, are overwhelmed by 120 volts. All right, any other, anyone else wanna suggest a working,

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I have a few more, but I don't wanna steal it. Anybody else wanna volunteer some ideas when they think about omnipotence, what that means?

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Give me a definition for omnipotence, right, exactly. It doesn't exactly come from him as if it is expending something out of him, draining him like a battery in some fashion.

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He is the origin of it, right, when we say source. And so no matter what powers, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit more later, no matter how much power he's putting out, it does not diminish him in any way.

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Yes, thank you, very good, power in the control, like in the sovereignty sort of thing, right?

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We're gonna talk a lot about that today, too, in terms of his sovereignty. God is able to do whatever he wills in the way he wills it.

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Right, that's God's sovereignty, and that is a very important part of God's omnipotence when we talk about it.

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And another way to talk about sovereignty is that God possesses absolute might and absolute right.

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God possesses absolute might and absolute right. That's the

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Monroe Doctrine on steroids. Yeah, God is able to do whatever he wills in the way he wills it, yeah.

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Jerry Bridges said this about sovereignty. He said, if there is a single event in all of the universe that can occur outside of God's sovereign control, then we cannot trust him.

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But in fact, in that infinite, near infinite number of stars that I was just talking about, all across the cosmos, every molecule in that entire universe, every motion, every happening that's going on, both here and elsewhere, is all under God's sovereign control.

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All right, so one thing that often goes hand in hand when we're talking about omnipotence is

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God's majesty, is God's majesty. And J .I. Packer, in his famous book,

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Knowing God, he doesn't have a chapter on omnipotence, but he does have a chapter on majesty. So I borrowed a few things from that chapter.

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He looks at Psalm 139, and he sees God's majesty there in all four, actually, of the divine omni.

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So turn with me to Psalm 139, and let's talk about that for a little bit. Of course,

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Psalm 139 has a few very famous verses in them, verse 13 and 14, and we will talk about those.

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But as we go through Psalm 139, we're gonna see, like I said, Packer sees all four of the divine omnis.

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One through four, verses one through four, we see omniscience. O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

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You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

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This one is one that always amazes me when you really think about it deeply. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold,

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O Lord, you know it all together. I am constantly falling victim to speaking before I think, right?

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Just letting those words blurt out. I can't think fast enough even to keep up with my own tongue and God knows all the words that are gonna come out of my mouth before I even form them.

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All right, then verses five and six, we have God's omnisapience.

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You hem me in behind and before, you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

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It is high, I cannot attain it, right? And this is a knowledge more to the idea of a wisdom, right?

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That he understands, he knows the best path for us. He knows the direction we ought to go. He knows what is right and best for us.

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Then verses seven through 12 are his omnipresence. Where shall I go from your spirit or where shall

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I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there, right?

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That there's nowhere in all creation that God is not and that's what we already dealt with extensively last week.

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Thanks, Andrew, with omnipresence. And then finally, verse 13 and 14 are omnipotence.

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Verse 13 and 14 are omnipotence. And really, when you think about it, it's as if David is he's going through all these other three omnis, these attributes of God.

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He gets now to verse 13 and 14 and you can sort of feel the sense of he's just overwhelmed with God's majesty, as Packer says, so much so that even to himself, right?

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He gets very personal here in verse 13 and 14. You formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb.

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David did not have the kind of knowledge that we have today of how our inward parts work.

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He did not have MRIs and X -rays and anatomy textbooks, right?

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And if anyone, I mean, of course, it all comes from your presuppositions and your worldview, but if from a

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Christian, coming from a Christian worldview, when I take any amount of time to study and consider how the human body works,

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I am just stunned and amazed that it keeps going. There are so many things going on at once in my body and in your body all the time, right?

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And God had to put into our brains an autopilot so that all those things, our brain could control and make all those things happen without us consciously thinking of them because if we had to consciously think of them, we couldn't do it, right?

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We couldn't possibly keep all the thoughts going to be like, oh, wait, stomach do this. Oh, intestines do that.

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Oh, breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. Blink. It would force us to think before we talk.

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Tongue up, down, okay. So Packer asks, he says, how may we form a right idea of God's greatness?

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Well, the Bible teaches us that there are two steps we must take and that's what's on your worksheet there about two steps that we must take.

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The first is to remove from our thoughts of God, move from our thoughts of God, any limits that would make him small, any limits that would make him small.

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And Packer's argument is that any limit makes him small, right?

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There are no limits to God. And anytime, we really need to be careful and catch ourselves that anytime we start and are trying to meditate and think about God, to be aware and cognizant of thinking limiting thoughts of him.

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And the second is to meditate on passages like Psalm 39 or others where to compare him with the powers and forces which we regard as great, okay?

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To compare him with the forces and powers which we regard as great with the idea, of course, being that if you do that, he's always gonna come out on top, right?

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As the greatest and most powerful things you can think of, God's still gonna come out on top of those, right?

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He is God Almighty. And that's well covered by Isaiah 40.

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So let's turn to Isaiah 40 now and look at Isaiah 40 starting in verse 12.

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This is where we compare him, we remove those limiting thoughts and we compare him with the forces and powers which we regard as great and see how he still comes out on top.

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Verse 12 through 14, lots of songs written about this, right?

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Who has measured the waters and the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span and close the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains and scales and the hills in a balance.

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Look at the tasks that God has done. Look at those tasks.

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Can anyone else do anything like that? The answer, of course, is no. Isaiah 40, verse 12.

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Yeah. Now look at verse 15 in Isaiah 40. Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as the dust on the scales.

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Behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust. Verse 17, all the nations are as nothing before him.

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They are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness and we worry about China, right?

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We think of all the great nations of the earth and how

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God, but look how God compares to them. Verse 22, it is he who sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.

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So how about the world itself, right, compared to God? How about all those forces of nature?

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Nothing. Verse 23, how about man who brings princes to nothing and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness, right?

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We often cower in fear of powerful men and women. Often, I'd say we tend to fear powerful people more than we might even fear nature itself.

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And yet, what can man do to us that God is not sovereign over? Then verse 26,

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Isaiah just keeps going. Verse 26, lift up your eyes on high and see who created these, he's talking about the stars, who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name.

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By the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing.

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I already said billions, trillion, billion, billion, trillion in number.

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Unfathomably large distances apart too, by the way. Despite the impression that you might get from your solar system poster in your fourth grade classroom, space is really, really empty.

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It's really empty. If I had a, like just to give you the relative size things, if I had the sun here in my hand and it was the size of a basketball, okay?

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Earth is down the street. It is not close, right?

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There is a lot of nothing in between us and the sun. And yet, most of our celestial bodies we have observed, like the sun, are crushingly huge compared to Earth, crushingly huge.

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There are stars that absolutely put our sun to shame in terms of size, so big that they themselves fill all the space from us to Earth or us to sun, right?

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And yet, God is bigger, right? God is more powerful than that.

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Every second that solar system star of ours, it puts out the same amount of energy as 384 hydrogen bombs per second.

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384 H -bombs per second. And God is the source of all that energy. And as we said earlier, to put out 384 hydrogen bombs per second, worth diminishes him in no way.

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Diminishes him in no way, empties him in no way because his power like him is infinite. And the great thing about infinity is infinity minus 384 is still infinity.

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Sorry, there's math this morning. Dave, oh, here we go.

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Thank you, Dave. Wow, Dave, did you like get my notes ahead of time? That's amazing. Yes, or no, you're looking at the worksheet.

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Right, okay, so here we go. So Dave just introduced my next point, and I swear he's not an audience play it.

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It's called the omnipotence paradox. The omnipotence paradox. Because like omnipotence is one that brings out the skeptics and the challengers.

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And the simplest and most direct is this logical challenge to its limitlessness, which is what

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Dave's trying to illustrate here. The more famous one is the one that I put on the worksheet, which is can

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God create a rock so large that he cannot lift it? Right, Dave just asked, can God create a star that doesn't need his sustaining power in order to keep putting out

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H -bombs worth of energy, right? Can he create a rock so large he cannot lift it? Another one is, can he create another being who is equally unlimited in power?

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Or, this is a good one, that most famous of American idiot savant philosophers,

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Homer Simpson. He, in an episode a few years ago, put out the question, can

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Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cannot eat it? Ned Flanders did not have a good answer for that, by the way.

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Shocker, don't go to the Simpsons for your theology. But anyway. Yes, Sharon, I really wanna answer the questions, but go ahead.

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Okay, all right. So these are the favorite retorts of the armchair skeptic, right?

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Because they sound like a slam dunk. If you grab a college -educated secularist off the streets of Cambridge or Boston, and you ask them to comment on omnipotence,

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I bet this is the first place they'd go. This is the kind of question they'd wanna ask. And they'd probably ask it with some smarmy self -assuredness.

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Like, aha, gotcha. So, let's ask the A -team to save us.

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Anybody remember the A -team? Got our three names? Who's the A -team? No, not that A -team. The A -team we've been talking about in class.

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Augustin, Anselm, Aquinas. What's that?

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Pity the fool who doesn't remember Aquinas. It's a good joke, I like that. Okay, yes.

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All right, so Anselm is the one who's gonna come save us first. From all the way back in the 1200s, he's gonna come and save us and bury this paradox, all right?

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Because Anselm, he corrects our misconception. What he says is we should be asking the opposite question.

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If God could do these things, if he could create a rock so large, if he could create another being who was more powerful, would it be a display of impotence rather than omnipotence?

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Would it be a display of impotence rather than omnipotence? And here's his quote. For he who can do these things can do what is not good for himself and what he ought not to do.

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And the more he can do these things, the more power adversity and perversity would have over him.

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Okay? So the idea is that if we posit that God could do such a thing, what in fact he would be doing is limiting himself in power.

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He would be rendering himself impotent instead of omnipotent. So of course, it's a logical,

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Anselm's thing is it's a logical inconsistency. You cannot ask or expect an omnipotent being to do something that would then limit his omnipotence.

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Okay? So it's just, it's a logical inconsistency. Augustine said 800 years earlier still, he said, assuredly, he is rightly called omnipotent, though he can neither die nor fall into error for he is called omnipotent on account of his doing what he wills.

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That's the omnipotence, doing what he wills, not on account of his suffering, what he wills not.

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For if that should befall him, he would by no means be omnipotent. Wherefore, he cannot do some things for the very reason that he is omnipotent.

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How's that? You're with me a little bit? I'm gonna keep going. There's more to this.

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Barrett also flips this question around, and I like how Barrett does this, because this is why

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Barrett dealt with God's simplicity before he got to omnipotence. Simplicity means what?

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Anybody besides Andrew remember? God doesn't have parts, and so since God doesn't have parts, that means what about his attributes?

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He is all of them, all the time. Yes, Janet's doing this with her hands. He is all of them all the time.

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All of them all the time. Okay, in no conflict. Thus, by simplicity,

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Barrett says, God cannot do anything that would violate his other attributes. Because that would make no sense.

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Here's another great point that Barrett makes. He says, you know, in our modern culture, probably especially, we associate power with doing.

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With doing. What about power in not doing? What about power in not doing?

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Joseph does not commit adultery. Doesn't that make him powerful? Moses does not accept the offer to have a nation made from his descendants, replacing

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Israel. Jesus does not turn stones into bread.

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Barrett says that not doing something is in fact a far greater signifier of power. Self -control is not a weakness, but a sign that one is more powerful than those who cannot control themselves or their actions.

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Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would put that in the class of, can he create a being who is as powerful as he is, right, kind of thing.

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Can he create something that doesn't need him? Well, no, because he is a seity.

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He is from, all things are from himself. And in both directions, I would argue as well, right?

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God is like, God has designed the universe such that we look up and we look outward and we cannot get, we just can't find the boundaries, like Charlie said.

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And in the same way, we look down and inward and microscopically and we just, we keep thinking we've gotten to the smallest particle and then we find another smaller thing yet, right?

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Smaller and smaller and smaller, it's like the atom, that's the smallest thing. Okay, protons, neutrons, electrons, that's the smallest.

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Okay, quarks, that's the smallest. There's sub -quarks, I don't know, right? Like we just, we can't do it, right?

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We can't do it. Yeah. So, God has self -control to perfection.

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So the answer to this omnipotence paradox is that God cannot, or maybe an even better term that he will not, he will not microwave a too hot burrito or create too heavy a rock, okay?

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Because God's omnipotence is both limitless power and limitless self -control.

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I mean, maybe, but I didn't find it. I didn't put it in my notes.

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I mean, we're getting into the accommodation language right now, right? In terms of we can only talk in human terms.

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And so we think about the idea of a limit, but limit's not really the best word here because to us, limit has the connotation of like a reduction in power.

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Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Charlie. Something else that's gonna happen is gonna be not good.

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Yeah, right, right. Sorry, get the duct tape out. Here we go. We didn't warn you ahead of time.

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I, yeah, I know. But no, this is good. I love this. You guys are great. You guys, like, you are cheating off the worksheet and you just keep introducing my next point every time.

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Because my next point is that this, this omnipotence paradox and some of this stuff, we're starting to talk about goodness and sin and whatnot.

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Like, this brings us to the more serious challenge because when we speak of God's self -control, we might wrongly start to think of God as choosing some sort of like relinquishing of his power.

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Right, or voluntarily abstaining from acting in the world. And that's not how we should think.

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Some years ago now, quite a few years ago now, there was a man named Rabbi Harold Kushner.

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Everybody hear of him? Nice and famous, right? He wrote a book. Anybody remember the title of the book?

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Yeah, it's, yeah. The book's title is When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Right, we've paraphrased it in various ways.

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But When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Now, of course, Kushner said, was wrestling with this and he was saying, well,

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I've got the notions of all good and all powerful and he could not reconcile those, right?

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How could an all powerful God allow evil to come into the world, allow bad things to happen if he's all good?

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Well, Kushner, he couldn't, I think, psychologically just bear with the thought of a not all good

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God. So he chose to, and he had set up this false dichotomy, this false choice as if the two couldn't possibly both be true.

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So he went with choosing all good and he created what, I don't know if he created it, there's probably people before him, but he popularized this notion of theistic finitism, right?

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That God either voluntarily or not abstains from acting in the world, right?

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That there's some relinquishing of his power so he is not actually all powerful the way we've been talking about today.

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Now, Sproul, R .C. Sproul was, of course, very fond of rebuking this question in what way?

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What was Sproul's kind of pithy response? Anybody remember? There are no good people, right?

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That's what he always would say. He said, well, the problem is there are no good people. There was only one good, he very famously said, there was only one good person ever.

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Yes, and you killed him, right? Yeah, what is wrong with you people?

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Yeah, exactly. Yeah, now, I agree with Sproul, I love that answer, but I also think that it evades the force of the question.

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Okay, because what's really the question here? Really the question here is, if God is both all good and all powerful, how does evil even exist in the first place?

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And we call that famously, it's known as the problem of evil. Okay, the problem of evil.

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And not just Christian theologians have to wrestle with this, this is a general philosophical question.

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There are secular philosophers, there are theologians of all the other world religions all wrestle with this notion of the quote -unquote problem of evil.

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If God is both all good and all powerful, how does evil even exist in the first place? Now, Augustine, one of the first great responses, and his response to this problem of evil is what we today called free will theodicy.

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Free will theodicy, or free will defense. Because the word theodicy, what it means is the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil.

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So any kind of theodicy is essentially just a fancy term for a theory to solve the problem of evil.

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Okay? So that's a theodicy. And Augustine's theodicy was the free will theodicy.

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To Augustine, evil is a byproduct of God's creativity. That's the important thing to imagine, or to posit.

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That he said that God created only good, and good is a thing. Evil is not a thing.

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It is the loss of good, or the absence of good. So that's

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Augustine. That's the word, by the way, the fancy word privation. Privation, which is that all evil, all which is evil is deprived, like deprived privation, deprived of good.

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Okay, all that is evil is deprived of good. That's Augustine coined that phrase.

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So to Augustine, what that means is that Adam and Eve did not choose evil per se, but rather turned away from choosing good.

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And there was a loss of good. Now, after Adam and Eve, as descendants, or essentially after the fall, and us as descendants of Adam and Eve, what that means is, you know, our wills are now in bondage to sin, so we've lost free will.

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Okay, but Augustine posited that Adam and Eve did in fact have it. That as part of their original creation, they had this free will, and chose, you know, to turn away from good.

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So, you know, it's, one writer cautioned, he said, you know,

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Augustine is not trying to make sense of evil. To make sense of it, to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify its cause would mean that it has a place in this world.

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Evil is what ought not to be. It is the disorder of creation.

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The violation that we protest. Evil has no place, no room to fit, no home here in a good creation.

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Okay? Yeah, I know, I'm with, yeah. Now, I don't have time at all, but there's, if you wanna look him up, there's a modern day

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Christian philosopher named Alvin, I can't, Plantinja? Plantinja?

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Plantinga? Thank you. And he's further refined this theodicy, and he's actually done it so well that most philosophers, secular and otherwise, think that he has solved it.

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Like, most philosophers consider the logical problem of evil fully rebutted by what,

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Plantin, how did you say it? Plantinga. Like, how he took

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Augustine's theodicy and further refined it and planted it out. But it gets deep into the doing syllogisms and whatnot, and I'm not gonna force you guys through that this morning.

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But if you wanna read all about it, it's pretty cool. All right. Because we are so almost out of time.

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Here we go. So that all kind of starts with the idea that God is all good, right?

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So it starts with the idea of how God is all good and how did evil originate. But interestingly, Barrett's approach in the book, in None Greater, is he starts with God's omnipotence.

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He doesn't start with the all good, he starts with the all powerful. And he says, is, he just says, well, let's start with the notion

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God is all powerful and explain how he can also be all good. And basically say, is

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God, he asks, is God in control of all the evil in the world? Is God in control of all the evil in the world?

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Well, let's read a few places. I know we don't have a ton of time, but we'll just do this and then maybe we'll stop.

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And I will have to pick up more next week. It'll be omnipotence plus omniscience next week. What's that?

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Yeah, right, okay. It'll just be the rest of omnipotence. I'll be doing this for four weeks in a row. All right. Deuteronomy, stop making me go slower.

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Okay, Deuteronomy 32, 39. Can somebody please raise their hand and read for me?

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Deuteronomy 32, 39. Yes, Joshua, thank you.

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1 Samuel 2, 6 and 7. I got four of these. I need four volunteers.

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Charlie, 1 Samuel 2, 6 and 7. Job 121. Gary, thank you.

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Isaiah 45, 6 and 7. Becky, thank you.

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Isaiah 45, 6 and 7. All right, Deuteronomy 32, 39. I think heal and make alive, we all are like, yeah, sure.

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But kill and wound? I kill and I wound, God says. 1

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Samuel 2, 6 and 7. Yeah, he makes poor, he kills, he brings low.

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Job 121, one of the more famous statements. The Lord gives, but there's also the opposite.

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The Lord takes away. And then Isaiah 45, 6 and 7.

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And this is the most shocking statement, honestly, of them all. So again, those opposites. But listen, he creates darkness and he creates calamity.

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That create word, that is the Hebrew word bara. That is the same strong word that's used for ex nihilo creation in Genesis 1.

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Out of nothing, God creates darkness and he creates calamity. And calamity is the

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Hebrew word ra, which is usually everywhere else translated evil, harmful, wicked, that he creates this.

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Barrett says that God's point is to make it crystal clear that he is the one who is in control of all things.

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All things, even the things that we think of as harmful or calamity, right?

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Not even the most threatening acts against his people or his kingdom, the most evil actions of his enemies are beyond his control.

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I am the Lord who does all these things. Yes, yes. Which now we're gonna have to probably get to next week.

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But yes. Because the idea is that if God's control is this extensive, right?

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Now we flipped the usual question around. Rabbi Kushner, he had to start with a good

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God and ask whether he was really in control. Kushner decided he wasn't.

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Augustine decided he was. Right? But here's Barrett in none greater starting with an all powerful

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God and now moving on to asking whether he is really good. If God controls evil, Barrett asks, is he then evil himself?

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If God is controlling evil, is he then evil himself? Right? Well, the answer is no.

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No. And here's why. There's two ways and we'll, let me just share with you the two and then we will actually discuss them next week because I don't want to leave you on that question without answering it.

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What's that? It's that, that's too much of a cliffhanger. The two ways that Barrett says is one,

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God is equally in control of good and evil, but we should not assume that he relates to both in the same way.

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And we're going to look at Job one and two to look about that. Okay? And then the second one from Romans eight is that God ordains evil only in so far as for our good and his glory.

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Okay? So it is, as you can imagine right there, this notion of the idea of ordained versus originated.

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Okay? And that's what we're going to get, that's the distinction that we're going to get into. That God is equally in control of the evil and the good, but we should not assume that he relates to both in the same way.

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Good is directly from God, but evil is always indirect. It's ordained, but not originated by him.

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Okay? All right, so we will explain that more next week rather than try to start that point now.

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Any comments about some of the other stuff that we talked about this morning before we close?

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Okay. All right. Heavenly Father, thank you so much, Lord, for helping us to deal with each one of these topics.

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There's always both incredible, we stand in incredible awe, and we also know that we must deal with difficult challenges that others might posit.

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And Lord, you have an answer for all them if we simply seek your wisdom and we do it patiently and humbly, knowing that you are incomprehensible and yet you have revealed to us all that we need to know about you.

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Father, I just pray for all of us to think rightly about you that we would not think thoughts that limit you.

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Would you help us especially even in this coming week now that we've been learning about this today that as we might in just practical, the day -to -day of our lives, where we might think some small thought of you, would you correct us immediately,

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Lord? Would you help us to see how such things are wrong to think about you and dishonor you and help us instead to praise you for your limitlessness?

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And I pray, Lord, now for the rest of our service this morning for pastor and for all the others to serve and that we bring a glory to your name this morning.