Stop Trying to Make Sense of Suffering | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to encourage you to stop trying to make sense of suffering.

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And we're not just trying to be punchy. The reality is in the church today, we don't do ourselves a favor in trying to read through the lines of God's providence and trying to read the tea leaves and figure out exactly what

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God is up to and all of the hard things that we endure in this life. Let's be real. There's a lot of times that we go through stuff where there's just no earthly good at all in sight and platitudes and the way that we rip scripture out of context doesn't help.

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So we're going to consider today things that are absolutely clear and true about God as he revealed himself in his word.

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And we're going to think about the promises that the Lord has made to us through Jesus Christ and what he's accomplished for us.

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We do have an eternal hope that's unshakable and this is what we cling to. So that's the subject matter for today.

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John and I over in SR will continue that conversation. It's just a little bit more fun, a little bit punchier over there.

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We sincerely hope that you're encouraged by this as you continue to sojourn in this fallen world.

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Stay tuned. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

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Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are

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John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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John, always good to be around the mic with you, bro. Good to talk before we record. And as we've been chopping it up over what we're going to discuss today on the show, this is definitely a very pastoral kind of conversation that we hope to have.

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Amen. It is. It's directly connected to some sermons

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I've been preaching, conversations Justin and I have. And when you look at just suffering in the world in general, and today's title was, we understand it's a little punchy, but there's a direct connection behind it and why it's so important.

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In many ways, the Bible itself takes our hand and puts it over our mouth and says, you probably need to be quiet here in trying to ask

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God or even trying to figure out what God is doing. So that's really what this conversation is about, is trying to have a very clear and biblical understanding of suffering and the

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Christian. And something you said, Justin, that I'm going to go ahead and grab now. The Bible offers us a perspective that is heavenly, otherly.

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It is a new heavens and a new earth, but yet we live earthbound. It's like we cannot move past this, what we see in front of us.

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The treasures here seem more real and beneficial than the treasures that have been offered to us in our

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Father's home. And yet we would rather stay in this world and have these treasures and let us build a world here.

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And yet the Bible is constantly calling us to take our home and our hope and put it in a whole nother location, which is with the

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Father. So we're going to talk about how those two dynamics, I would say two kingdoms, how those two dynamics are often at war with each other and really the confusion that happens in modern day

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Christianity, where we look at the suffering in our life and we're trying to find the pain point to remove it.

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If only this, then this will get better. That's right. And I call it the if -then. If I can do this, then

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I will be satisfied because this pain will be removed. And sometimes we even think about past events, something that happened that can't be reversed.

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You're no longer suffering currently from that pain, but you want to know why it happened.

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And so that's gnawing at you. Because if you can figure out why it happened, then you can prevent it from happening again.

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And so all of these we struggle with constantly, the potential for suffering, the current suffering we're in, and what has caused it in the past.

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And we want to know why. And unfortunately, there's going to be a very complicated situation we're going to find ourselves in, but we're not without hope.

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So let's start with the bad parts, Justin, kind of the ways in which people have handled this in the past, not so helpful and clearly not so biblical.

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Like you said, we always want to do that if -then thing. If this, then that.

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It's how we tend to think. And in some ways that's understandable because we are taught rightly in this world responsibility and consequences of our actions.

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All of those things are true in the common kingdom. They're true in the world that God has made. And at the same time, the

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Bible is clear that we can't always draw those straight lines from this to that. We can't always draw lines from sin to suffering or circumstance to suffering or action to suffering, though we always want to do it that way.

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And I do agree. I just want to double down on this. As a pastor, I feel like I have this conversation all the time, that we're always trying to figure out what

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God is up to. We're always trying to read between the lines of his providence. We're trying to read the tea leaves of what's happening in our lives and figure out what

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God's trying to teach us, or we're trying to glean things from things that we've gone through so that that same thing doesn't happen again.

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Some of those things up to a point are okay. Some of them, like trying to figure out what God is up to, is just a fool's errand.

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We are incredibly presumptuous in how we go about doing this sometimes, and we're most certainly going to get it wrong because God is up to millions of things in the world.

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He's up to so many things in our lives individually, and we just see so few of them. So we have to acknowledge our limited perspective.

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That's kind of teeing up the ways this is often done poorly. People draw inaccurate conclusions, and they even misrepresent

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God, I think, sometimes in the ways that suffering is talked about because we do struggle so much to make sense of the pain we experience.

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I just want to say this really quickly. When we experience pain and suffering, it should, in some senses, affect us and wreck us because it's a reminder constantly that things are not as they should be.

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This world has fallen. The Apostle Paul uses the language of how the creation was subjected to futility and how it now groans, and we groan too.

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A lot of times, John, the stuff I hear and the stuff we're going to point out right now, people do things with God.

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They'll either act like He's not sovereign, so they try to get Him off the hook, or maybe on the flip side, it's like He's clearly sovereign, but then the question is raised, how is

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He good? We misrepresent His sovereignty, and God comes across malevolent as though He means us harm.

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Another thing that I see commonly, and you could maybe riff on this too, is people act as though if we rightly apply the

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Scriptures, if we really take Proverbs, for example, take other passages that contain wisdom and instruction, if we just take these things to heart, if we apply them, if we meditate on them sufficiently and put them to good use, then perhaps our lives will just go well.

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My response to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by well. There's a lot that can be gleaned from Proverbs or any other section of Scripture that deals with wisdom and practical things.

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God teaches us with His law what's good and bad and right and wrong. It's better to conform yourself to God's law.

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It will go better for you. All that's true, but if you think that applying God's word rightly will deliver you from suffering, you're misguided.

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If you think it will deliver you from weakness, you're misguided. If you think it means that things will never fall apart in your life, you're misguided.

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If we think that we can be delivered from suffering altogether, or at least mitigate it greatly if we rightly apply

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God's word, I think we have misunderstood. This Christian life is not one where we are moving from triumph to triumph.

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We've said this lately, and from just high to high. We're learning to trust Christ in the midst of weakness and pain and suffering.

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We will suffer now, and glory is coming. We're going to get there later. So much of what we're given in the Scripture is

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God, who He is, His plan of redemption, and what He's promised us in His Son that's unshakeable. Justin Perdue Well, there are two areas that we're blinded to in this current fallen world.

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We're blinded to our own sin, our own problem. This is why the light of the gospel has to come in and show our hearts to be just full of nothing but putrefied sin.

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We need Christ to come in and redeem us. The second area we fall into is that we can assume this world is not that bad, and so it just needs a little fine -tuning, a little correction.

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Justin Perdue Louis Armstrong. What a wonderful world. Trees of green, clouds of white.

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There's some truth in that, but go. Justin Perdue Well, if it's so great, then why is it being made new?

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Why are we starting over? Right, and it's like we live in a world where our loved ones die. We bury our children.

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Only an insane person would look around and say that everything's as it should be. Justin Perdue Right. Justin Perdue When death exists, everything is not as it should be, because what is the promise of the new heavens and the new earth?

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No more death, no more pain, no more suffering, no more sorrow, no more evil. So when you look around and it's like, that's not that bad, and I go, the thing that makes it bad is the thing that we're ignoring, which is death and suffering and pain and sorrow.

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We medicate ourselves, and we distract ourselves with these things.

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But going back to probably one of the most famous books on suffering in the Bible, which is Job, James uses

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Job in a very interesting way. James is writing to churches that are suffering, and what's interesting about it is he never offers them relief from suffering.

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We'll get to what he does offer them, but in the beginning, he's like, well, actually, you can embrace your suffering with joy because there's something behind it, which is interesting.

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He doesn't offer them a logical explanation for the suffering.

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He only explains to them how to handle it, which is fascinating. Then within James 5, he's coming down to the end.

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The first six verses in James is talking about how the wealthy are absolutely brutalizing the churches, and James offers them this response, be patient for the return of the

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Lord is nigh. He uses as examples two groups of people.

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The first one, he says, is he uses the prophets. He goes, look to the prophets and how they endured suffering.

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The writer of Hebrews describes the suffering of these prophets.

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It's Hebrews 11, 36. It says, others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment.

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They were stoned. They were sawn in two. They were killed with swords. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, of whom the whole world was not worthy, wandering about in the deserts and mountains.

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It's this endless describing of what happened. James uses that as an illustration.

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He says, look to them for the purposes of suffering. Then he says the same thing about Job, which is interesting to use

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Job, because I don't know if I would describe Job as being a patient person in the midst of suffering.

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He started out well. James 1 says, in all these things, he didn't sin. Then you keep reading.

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You keep reading. What's interesting about the dialogue between the accuser, Satan, and God is that there's this dialogue.

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Basically, Satan says, the only reason Job loves you is because you blessed him. This is

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Proverbs 10, 22. Proverbs 10, 22 says, the blessings of the Lord make rich, and he adds no sorrow within it.

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The accusation came. It's like, well, you remove these blessings, and Job is going to curse you, and he's going to turn on you.

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The whole point of this is he keeps adding suffering. Towards the very end, you do see that Job finally says, all right,

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God, you need to give me a little bit of an explanation of why are you allowing the suffering. What's interesting is that there's nothing within the dialogue that we would conclude that Job knows about this conversation between Satan and God.

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We just don't know about it. Joe's not privy to that, just as we're not. We actually don't even know who wrote

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Job. Maybe it was Job. Who knows? We're not privy to the secret decreed will of God.

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We're not privy to the counsel of God. You see that in the story.

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You see that God actually never says, well, this was a conversation between Satan and God. That whole pulling back the curtain thing, Job doesn't see that.

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That's the inspired author giving us the behind -the -curtain look at what's going on from God's perspective.

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In the midst of his suffering, Job says some really interesting things. Job 10 .18 says, why did you bring me forth out of my womb?

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Would that I had died before my eyes had seen you? I'm just going to comment on this really quick because I think this is great.

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Job, like you said, starts off really well. He bears up underneath the things that happen to him.

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He'll even say that the Lord gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. His wife curses him for it.

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He starts off well, but then oftentimes we skip from Job 2 to Job 38. When people think of the book, they know the first two chapters and they know 38 to the end.

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There are dozens of chapters in between of wrestling that's a very mixed bag of Job saying some things that are very true and Job saying some things that are just not.

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I think we can identify with both, and I think we can see in Job ourselves to some extent.

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The man spends the chapter after chapter two. Chapter three is an entire chapter of Job literally lamenting and cursing the day he was born.

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He goes on to say in various other places that his bones waste away, that when he tries to find rest on his couch,

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God doesn't even let him sleep. There's just no escape for him. I know we're going to get to Job 19 in a second, but we'll save that for the latter part.

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Then you have Job's friends who show up, and it's a perfect explanation of what Christianity does today.

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Job's friends show up and at first they sit there and they mourn with him, but this is true of all humans.

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We don't like suffering. Before long, they're thinking, we need to figure out why you're suffering here.

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We got to get underneath it. We got to explain it. Then they do this, if this, then that thing.

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That's exactly right. Job gets so frustrated with them and says, you know, you guys would appear wise if you just closed your mouth.

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It's like if you stopped talking, you would actually appear to be wise. They did this very thing where they're trying to say, okay,

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Job, you need to repent because this is why this is happening. Clearly there's sin in your life, dude.

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That's right. We finally get to the end of the book and Job's like, I demand of you to tell me, to give me an answer.

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This is God's response. Job 38 .4. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?

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Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined this measure? Surely you know. That is such a sarcastic statement.

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It's huge. Job, do you know how big the world is? I can tell you. Do you? Surely you know.

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Where were you when I hung the stars? Surely you understand these things. When I closed in the sea and told it where the waves were going to go.

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Come this far and no further. All that. That's right. The point of that is, what's interesting is that God never answers

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Job's question with what you think he would want. The point of it was, I'm in charge,

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Job. I know what's going on from beginning to end. I control all things. Basically, at the end,

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Job goes, oh man, what did I do? I should never have opened my mouth. It's not as though God is being mean to Job.

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I know you agree. Effectively, what he's saying, rhetorically, there is.

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It's dripping with this sarcasm. Surely you understand these things, Job. If you're going to put me in the dock, surely you understand this.

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Are you going to counsel me? Then, effectively, the way it all comes across is, it's as though God looks at Job and says, child, you don't understand.

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I am the Lord, and you don't understand. Job agrees with God.

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He says, I do repent because I thought I knew you.

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I thought I understood, and I don't. You are the Lord. You are God, and I'm not.

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It's a really gripping thing that occurs. Let's briefly do this,

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John. Jon Moffitt Can we make one last conclusion here? Then I'll turn it over to you. James is using that as an illustration.

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He says this in this way, James 5 .11, Behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast.

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You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the

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Lord is compassionate and merciful. What's interesting is that that compassionate and merciful part is

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God's response to Job. He says, Job, let me explain to you who I am. In the end,

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Job goes, and what does the steadfastness mean? He means that at the end of God's explanation, Job goes,

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I still trust you. He didn't go from point A to point

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B without any problems. The guy was a roller coaster. People go from chapter 2 to chapter 38.

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In between that, there are dozens of chapters of wrestling, and we just tend to skip over that. There's a lot that can be learned and gleaned about us and about the

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Lord and about the way that we tend to process and handle suffering. We all tend to be like Job's friends.

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We don't do a good job of just sitting with people in the midst of pain and saying, okay, we can't draw straight lines here.

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We can't do the if -this -then -that thing. We can't say one -to -one correlation things, but we know who

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God is. We know what he's promised, and we're going to sit and we're We don't do well with that.

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I'm just going to go ahead and do this now before we maybe go back and talk about some things that are very clear about God from the

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Scriptures. We've already talked about Job. The whole book of Ecclesiastes is a great study on a lot of these things, because the preacher,

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Solomon in Ecclesiastes, says a lot of things that really unsettle us as modern

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Christians. It's like, bro, you shouldn't talk like that. But hey, I'm just describing the way the world is.

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This stuff happens, so what do you got? We could talk about how he even concludes that book.

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Here's what's good for man. I mean, enjoy what you can in this world, but ultimately fear God and keep his commandments. That's where he lands.

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That maybe is another conversation for another time. I'm just going to go ahead and do this too, to rend the foolishness from our hands of trying to draw straight lines from specific sins or specific actions to specific suffering and pain.

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We need to take great pains not to do that. We've already talked about Job, because Job is adamant, no,

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I've not done something to bring this on myself. God actually defends Job at the end of it all, that Job's friends had spoken wrongly.

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So even though Job wrestled, and I would say was inaccurate in how he processed some of his suffering and said some untrue things, it was not because of sin in Job's life that he suffered in the first place.

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Again, because we get that behind -the -curtain glimpse on what the Lord is doing. Similar things could be said about the words of Jesus.

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Luke 13, Jesus looks at a Jewish audience and says, you know the Galileans who were slaughtered by Pilate.

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Do you think that they were any worse than you? What do we think, John? The law economy,

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Job's friends. We would say, those people, they got what was coming to them. They clearly had something going on in their lives.

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They deserved it. Then Jesus, same passage, Luke 13, early verses. He says, what about the 18 people on whom the tower in Siloam fell and it killed them?

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Do you think that they were any worse than you? His answer in both cases is no. Unless you repent, you too will likewise perish.

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He's pointing it to a spiritual eternal reality. You deserve judgment.

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Don't delude yourself into who and what you are, but don't draw straight lines from, well, that happened, so that must mean this about that person's character.

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The wrestling of the Old Testament, we know this. Why do wicked prosper? I've seen people do that with California and earthquakes.

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They deserve that. That's right, because it's just God's judgment. John 9, the man born blind.

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How do the disciples think about it? They see this man by the roadside who's blind, and they look at Jesus. Who sinned?

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Was it him? Was it his parents that he was born this way? Jesus says neither, actually.

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He was born this way so that the purpose of God might be displayed through him. There are things going on behind and underneath this stuff.

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It's a secret, decreed will of God that we don't know, and we shouldn't presume to figure out.

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Deuteronomy 29, the secret things belong to the Lord, but the things that have been revealed belong to us and our children.

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We should concern ourselves with what God has revealed to us in his Word and quit trying to figure out the things that belong only to him.

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If you're new to Theocast, we have a free e -book available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness A Primer on Rest.

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If you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. Justin Perdue Well, what

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I find so comforting from Job and I find comforting from James is that it doesn't ignore the suffering as if it's not there, or it says, toughen up or just deal with it.

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What's interesting is that it deals with it in a different way. James says it this way. He says, count it all joy when you go into suffering.

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Why would he say that? It's such a weird thing to say, but the reason why he says it is that suffering is inevitable.

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We know that. Paul literally says we groan in these bodies. Suffering in and of itself is bad.

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How can James say what he says? He's talking about the preservation of the power of God in your life.

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Literally, in James 5, as he's coming down to the end of his letter, he says, don't grumble because of what's going on in these circumstances.

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He gives a response to it. He says, you be patient. This is how you're to be patient.

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This is 5 .8. He says, establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

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That's an illustration meaning that God's return is as close as your hand is right in front of you. It's at hand.

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It's right there. He says, establish your heart. Think about what is our heart.

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Our hearts tend to latch onto things that we love and things that we hope in and that we long for.

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He's saying, establish what you long for and you hope in and what you trust in in the return of God, meaning that's where relief is found.

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He never offers relief here. He never offers hope here. He gives examples. This section is so helpful for me.

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Remember when I read you a section in Hebrews where it talks about all of the things they suffered. In chapter 13, this is so good.

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He writes this, Hebrews 13 .7, remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. He's talking about the prophets again.

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He says, consider the outcome of their way of life. What's interesting there is that I do believe he's talking about how they suffered death.

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Then he says this, imitate their faith, which is interesting to me. He's saying this is how they suffered and how did they endure the suffering.

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He says their faith. You know what he says right after that, for they longed for a country that was not their own, not this one.

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James is doing the same thing. He's going back to chapter five. He's saying, look at the prophets, look at Job.

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They were patiently waiting for the coming of the Lord and what motivated that? Where did they establish their heart?

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He says, for the Lord is compassionate and merciful. There is so much that's impacted there.

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We're not called to make sense of the suffering, but we are not left to suffer senselessly, meaning that God is proving his compassion and his mercy.

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I'm going to drop this right here. When you suffer, the point is you will never suffer to the point that God will abandon you ever.

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He is going to preserve you no matter what it is that you go through. Part of the suffering is designed.

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He's using it as a means to proclaim the gospel. In other words, you are suffering because you're a child of God.

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That's a part of what we experience here in this world. Our eyes have been opened to the pain and sorrow that is around us.

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Justin Perdue Yeah. He's producing good things in us. That's true. Even in terms of a James idea, he's working steadfastness in us.

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Steadfastness, as we've said a number of times in the last six months, is all about us, theology of the cross kind of stuff, learning to trust

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Christ regardless in the midst of trying circumstance to depend more and more upon God's grace to sustain in the midst of pain.

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That's what steadfastness looks like in the lives of the saints. This is a Romans 5 reality too, where Paul will talk about how we have been justified and therefore we have peace with God.

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We now boast in it. We hope in the glory of God and we rejoice.

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We boast in hope of the glory of God. That's Romans 5 too. But then he says we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, character, hope, and hope doesn't put us to shame.

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Why? Because God's love for us has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This is the work of the

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Lord to do good in the lives of his people through these things. Whenever we read the apostles like this, we ought not to rejoice in trial and suffering because trial and suffering are good.

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We rejoice in the midst of trial and suffering because God is good and because God is faithful, because he's merciful, and because he's a redeemer.

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I think it's obvious, even in 2 Corinthians 4, Romans 8, when he'll talk about light and momentary afflictions, or when he'll talk about how the things that we're going through now are not worth comparing to the weight of glory that's coming.

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That's a statement about how great the glory is that's coming. It's not a statement about how light the trials are, because sometimes it's like the trials are really hard.

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Paul, even in 2 Corinthians 1, will say they experienced things in Asia that caused them to despair of life itself.

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So clearly he doesn't mean that these things are easy, but what he's pointing us to is an eternal hope. I know we're going to get there in a minute.

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I'll happily lead us into this piece. I want to go ahead and give people a little chalking of the field. Here are some things that we can say with certainty.

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Stop trying to read through the lines of Providence. Stop trying to read the tea leaves. Stop trying to figure out everything God's up to, but you can know these things about him.

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Go. You said what I was about to say. What's interesting is that James says establish your heart in the future.

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What is to come? He does not say try to figure out, because we're trying to find closure. We want to know why this happened.

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God doesn't tell you why it happened, other than sin came into the world and sin destroyed the world. That's all we know.

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I'll say this now too. I want to land us on all sweet eternal promises.

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I know you do too. We need to stop using verses as platitudes. Romans 8 .28,

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you slap it on the refrigerator, God works all things for good, and we think that we've solved the problem of pain. A lot of times we will say to people—maybe we don't literally say, though sometimes

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I fear we literally do say this—in the midst of heartbreak and pain, we'll say, God's going to work it for good.

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I'll say it this way in a safe way. At a minimum, the primary emphasis of the

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Apostle in those verses is an eternal eschatological reality, not a temporal one.

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I would say all. It's obvious.

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The context of Romans 8 .18, James 1, Romans 5, what

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God's producing in us through these things, that's good temporally. Ultimately, Romans 8, that context from verse 18 and following, that's all about the creation groaning, all of this, and the creation is waiting to be liberated.

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It's awaiting the revealing of the glory of the sons of God as we await the consummation of our redemption, which is the resurrection of our bodies.

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This is clearly an eternal forward -looking thing. Then we all of a sudden just forget that when we read

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Romans 8 .28 and we'll just look at each other and say, God's going to work it for good. He has ultimately in Christ promised us an unshakable kingdom.

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He has told us that we have a heavenly country that we're going to be citizens of. We're going to live with Him one day and we're going to be delivered from pain.

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We're going to be ripped from the grave and we're going to be raised incorruptible and imperishable. All that's coming. He has worked all things together for our good, but that does not mean that I'm going to see earthly good in things that I go through.

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This goes back to when Paul says in reference to suffering,

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I can do all things through Christ. What he means is I can endure this.

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I'll make it through to the end. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He doesn't mean as we often flip that as however you want to use it.

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The point of it is there's nothing in this world that will rip me from the hope I have from Christ.

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That's the promise of the gospel because he loses none. He uses that which is horrible, which is the trial.

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God says, don't worry, it's a good thing because I'm going to prove to you that there's nothing that's going to separate you from me.

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Nothing. Nothing will separate you. Justin Perdue That's right. Nothing. God's promised us that one day we'll be with him and he's going to wipe away every tear.

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All really will be made new and well. We know that that's what's coming.

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I want to do this, John. I want to briefly talk about a few things. God being in control, good, merciful. Let's just hit that really quick.

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We know these things are true. Then maybe we can land the plane with a little Job 19 in terms of what awaits us.

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Sorry for that pastor thing, giving the outline, but we're just going to do this. In thinking about the fact that God is in control, some things pop cornered around in my brain.

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Psalm 115 .3. Our God is in the heavens. He does everything he pleases, and by everything

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I trust, he means everything. He's not bound by anything outside of himself. He's not like us. He's not controlled by things outside of him.

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Isaiah 46, 8 -11. I am God, there is no other. I'm God, there's none like me.

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Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times, things not yet done. Saying my counsel shall stand and I'll accomplish all my purpose.

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It's obvious that he's in control. From before the foundations of the world, he's had a plan and he's bringing it to fruition.

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The emphasis of the scripture is not just that God knows the future. The emphasis of the scripture is that he's planned the future, and that makes the world of difference.

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Jon Moffitt Well, this is Nebuchadnezzar right after he got humiliated. Thinking that he's the most powerful being on the planet, he gets humiliated by God.

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Nebuchadnezzar then says, all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the heavens and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand or say to him, what have you done?

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That's an important reality for us to embrace, that God is absolutely in control.

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I know we say that and I know we want to believe it, but there are times we question it because we look at things and go,

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I'm not sure who's in control right now because this is insane. Justin Perdue What we're doing there is questioning.

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It's like, okay, if he is in control, is he good then? Based upon what I'm looking at. Do we fully understand this?

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No, but we're going to talk about what God has revealed. The things that are revealed belong to us. The first time that he really describes his character in the

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Scriptures in Exodus 34, how does he describe himself? He says, I'm a God merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

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I show steadfast love to thousands of generations. I forgive iniquity, transgression, and sin. Then he says,

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I will by no means clear the guilty, so he's upright. He's not okay with evil. That's a good thing, by the way.

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A lot of times, because we're sinners and because the law condemns us, we don't necessarily see

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God's righteousness and the fact that he will not tolerate or dwell with evil as a good thing all the time because it feels scary.

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The fact that he's like that is good news because if he was an all -sovereign deity who was cool with evil, that would be frightening and terrifying, but he's not because he's completely good.

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If you accept something and are comfortable with it, that says something about your character. God says,

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I hold back my anger, and he creates distance between creation and himself. What is the greatest promise?

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I'm sorry, I just have to go there now. What's the greatest promise that we have? This is Job 19, right?

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I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh

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I shall see God. That is the promise that the separation that happened in the garden between humanity and God is going to be restored, and we're going to be in his presence.

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Justin Perdue Well, you've already led us to the final piece. The things we can know are that God's in control, God's good, but then even more specifically in his goodness, he's merciful, but he's a

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Redeemer. This is who God is. You think of Ephesians 1 and 2.

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I'm going to go back to Job 19 in a second because it's just fire. It's good. But Ephesians 1 and 2, the plan of God from before the foundations of the world, how he was going to save us in Christ, and how he's given us every spiritual blessing, and he's going to bring this through to completion.

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It's obvious. Then Ephesians 2, here's what we were, but here's what

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God's done in making us alive together with Christ because of the riches of his love and because of the greatness of his mercy.

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This is why he's done this because of who he is. He's a Savior. It's like when we're questioning things that we don't understand, we see no earthly good in what we're going through, we can say these things, not as platitudes, not as things that will just make us feel better, but as something much more eternally significant that we can just hold each other and weep together as we trust our

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God and Father because he's in control. It hadn't gone off the rails from his perspective because he's good and because he's our

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Redeemer. We can trust him. Justin Perdue Well, there are times when someone comes up to offer you an explanation, you have to ask about their credentials.

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What gives you the credence that I need to stop and listen and say, okay, what you have to say matters?

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Sometimes people offer me explanations. I'm like, yeah, but what are your credentials? Why should I even concern myself?

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God comes up and says, well, I created everything. I sustain everything. I know everything, and I can do whatever

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I want, so here's my answer. You have to stop and go, yeah, okay. I think I'm going to go ahead and accept whatever his answer is because no one else has more knowledge and power than he does.

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It's hard because our human hearts sometimes are not okay with the way of God.

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We should be terrified by that statement. Wait a minute. Who are you to question

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God? This is why I love when Nebenezer says no one can stop him. No one stops his hand.

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Justin Perdue No one can stay his hand or question and ask him, what have you done? You're right. You're entirely right.

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We could do an entire episode on this reality that these things that we're talking about right now, when

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God does get in the stand and bear testimony like he does with Job and he does other places, we don't like what he has to say.

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We're like, okay, but that's not enough. That doesn't satisfy me. What you're saying,

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I just don't like it. I don't want it to be this way. That's what sin has done to us because we are at enmity with God.

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The fact that he is these things just doesn't sit well with fallen people. Justin Perdue You even look at Abraham as an example.

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God comes to Abraham with the credentials of God and tells Abraham what he's going to do.

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Abraham, we love the guy. He's such a great encouragement to us.

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Justin Perdue He's the model held up as being justified by faith. Justin Perdue The point of it is that we have so many examples in the

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Old and New Testament of those who have interactions with the Father. Our hearts get in the way.

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Our fleshly, sinful hearts get in the way of the promises of God. The point of it is, if you're sitting over here, and you're wrestling with this, and you're struggling, and you're not quite sure why these things are happening, and it gnaws at you.

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I just think that the instructions from James are so helpful. He says, ground your heart in the coming of the

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Lord. Look past all of this. Don't try and make sense of it today because one day you will see, and know, because you will stand, as Job says,

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I will see him in the flesh. With my own eyes, I will see God. Because you can't see him now, you'll die.

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But when you were redeemed, and you have a new... The angels cover their faces.

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They don't even look upon the Lord and see. But one day we will. It's a great hope to go.

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Not only is that going to happen, but the writers of the New Testament say, live every day as if it's going to happen today, because it's at hand.

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He says, establish yourself in that, and that will get you through the suffering.

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Justin Perdue May God give us grace for that. I'm not huge on apologetics, John, and I'm going to conclude us with this thought.

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I'm not huge on apologetics, but I do think this is compelling. Nobody has the answer. Nobody has a satisfactory answer for suffering and pain in the world.

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I don't care what religion or biblical, it doesn't matter. You don't have an adequate answer in terms of to explain all of the nuances of suffering and pain.

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But one thing that Christianity has to offer is the fact that God the

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Son took on flesh and dwelt in this world, and he suffers these things with us.

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He's not just some distant deity sitting off in the heavens who cannot identify with what we're going through.

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John Mark MacMillan has a song called The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds. He says, don't have an answer for hurt knees and cancers, but we have a

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Savior. I have a Savior who suffers them with me. That's a good word.

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Last thought on Job 19. The words are so incredible. If you're not familiar with the old rendering of the

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Book of Common Prayer in terms of the liturgy for the burial of a saint, they pick up on this from Job 19.

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The language there is beautiful. One day, I will stand covered in my own skin, and I will behold the

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Lord not with other, but with these same eyes I shall see him. What a promise.

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This is what awaits us. May God give us faith. May he give us grace to trust these things.

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This is what we need. We just sit, hold each other, we weep, and then when the time is appropriate, we point one another to these things.

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This is what God has promised for those who love him. Christ has secured it for us. He told us it's finished, and he's going to come back for us.

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I've told you that I've gone to prepare a place for you if it wasn't so, and I'm going to come get you and bring you to be with me where I am.

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That's the hope. We may not have an explanation, but we definitely have a hope. May God give us grace and faith, and trust that one day our faith will be turned aside.

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This is what we do. We press on and await the Lord's return. John and I are going to head over and record another podcast now.

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We do this each week. We record a podcast known as Semper Reformanda. Semper Reformanda is effectively a community of people who have partnered with Theocast to support the ministry.

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There's an application. There's not an application, there's an app. Application is stupid. I understand, but nobody uses that language.

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People don't even know what I mean. What is this dude talking about? There's an app that you can get on your computer or on your phone where the members of the

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Semper Reformanda community can all interact together. It's like Facebook, but better. There's all kinds of things that being an

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SR member affords you. Being a part of that community is one. Getting access to this other podcast is another.

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If you want more information about how you can become an SR member, you can find that on our website, theocast .org.

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John and I are going to continue this conversation. Who knows what else we might talk about over there? It's family time.

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We aim for that to be helpful and maybe slightly different than the content on the regular show. We're grateful for each of you.

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We hope you've been encouraged by this conversation. We'll talk with many of you over on SR. For those of you who are not, unfortunately not, going to be joining us there this week.