What Makes Jesus Unique? No one else made the claims that He did, He is alive...............
All the great religious leaders of history have one thing in common: they are dead. Only one man has risen from a grave never again to taste death. Jesus Christ died, was buried, remained in the grave for 3 days, then was raised to life again.
Jesus is unique. He is the only one proven to be the Son of God because God validated His Kingship and accepted His payment for our sins all with one incredible stroke: He raised Jesus from the dead!
Paul opens his letter to the Romans with this evidence about who Jesus is:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, which He had promised before by His prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. Romans 1:1-4
Because Jesus Christ is very much alive, five things are true right now that wouldn’t be true if He were just another dead religious leader like Confucius, Mohammed or Buddha.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead and is alive…Prayers are answered, We can talk to Jesus 24/7
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Some people are embarrassed because they think people won't understand why they're having such a hard time with this thing. They think people are going to look at that and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you're all torn up over that. And Charlene and I have experienced this with parents who are having a hard time with one or two children, and they won't tell us because they're thinking, "They've got six kids. They're just going to roll their eyes at me when I tell them I'm having a hard time with one kid or two kids." But can I tell you something else mature believers understand?
Suffering is relative. Suffering is relative. It's relative to whatever you've experienced in life up to that point. When we got married, it was the hardest thing we had ever done. When we had one kid, it was the hardest thing we had ever done.
When we had two kids, it was the hardest thing we had ever done. When we had four kids, it didn't help us or make anything easier to know that some people have twelve kids, it doesn't help. It was still the hardest thing we had ever done. Suffering is relative, and mature believers understand that. What you're going through might not seem like a lot to me, but I can appreciate it might be one of the hardest things you've ever been through.
What I'm going through might not seem like a lot to you, but you can appreciate that it might be one of the hardest things I've ever gone through. It's not a contest. It's not a contest. You don't come up here for prayer at the end and BJ and I say, well, tell us about your suffering, and we'll tell you whether it's valid or not. Or let's just hear everybody's different prayer requests, and then we'll judge who has the most impressive suffering, and the rest of you guys can wait till another week, and maybe you can climb the boards.
That's not how it works. It's not a contest. We don't compare people to one another. We point one another to Christ. So don't be embarrassed if your suffering isn't as significant as someone else's.
Your church family loves you and wants to love you through our trial. Others are embarrassed by the nature of their suffering, and there are all kinds of sensitive issues that we might not want to share with others. Might surprise you, but in 21 years of vocational ministry, I've never once received a prayer request for hemorrhoids. And yet, statistically, please don't ask me for prayer for that after the service. Okay, I'm joking, of course, but there are some sensitive issues that are significant in that they cause us significant suffering, but we're just too embarrassed to share them.
And so we suffer in silence, and we suffer alone, but we don't have to. When I talk about sharing and inviting people in, I'm always talking, by the way, about mature saints inviting mature saints in. And when I say mature, I don't mean close to your age or older. I don't mean that they've necessarily been through similar experiences as you're going through. I mean, they have a track record years-long of walking faithfully with Jesus.
I mean that they know His Word and they are led by His Spirit. And when you share an issue, even an embarrassing one, with a mature saint, you won't find judgment, you'll find compassion. And they will do what mature saints do they'll point you to Christ and they'll lead you to Christ. And I'm proud to say I know multiple people in this church who have opened up on very difficult issues that are causing them suffering. And I think they'd all tell you that they're so glad they did because they didn't find themselves ostracized.
Some people don't share their suffering with their church family because they've been given bad counsel in the past. And this is very, very unlikely to happen if you do what we just talked about and share only with mature believers with a track record years-long of walking faithfully with Jesus, those who know His Word and are led by His Spirit, but additionally understand that God's Word reveals things clearly. And so, if we think we're hearing from the Holy Spirit, we can test it against the Word of God. And if someone shares counsel with us, we can test it against the Word of God, because anything that's truly from the Lord is not going to contradict His Word. I've heard people say, "Well, I was given bad counsel." But the reality is they weren't in the Word.
They wanted somebody else to be in the Word for them and they weren't checking out what the Word says for themselves. If you want to know if what you're being told lines up with the Word, you have to be in the Word. You have to be a man or woman of the Scriptures. You can't outsource that. "Well, why don't you read it and you tell me?" You can't outsource it.
I've said it many times before. The best protection a church can have against false teaching is a congregation that knows the Word for themselves. The best protection you can have against bad counsel is to know the Word for yourself. Remember what David wrote in Psalm 119? He said, "Your Word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path."
And praise God. Be in a church like Gospel City where people know the Word and unbiblical counsel is not able to thrive or survive. Some people don't share their suffering with their church family because they don't think there'll be any benefit. This is simply a faith issue. What's that going to do but to believe that it's not going to accomplish anything.
You must believe that prayer accomplishes nothing, and that God's Word has no power, and neither of those things is true. There is unspeakable power in both. Do not ever forget who God is. He's the Lord of heaven and earth, the beginning and the end. The Almighty God, the creator of all things.
Do you not think he is powerful enough to help you in your suffering? He is. Do you not think he cares about you? He does. He does.
He's the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. If you don't think there'll be any benefit to having your brothers and sisters bring you to that God, then you don't know Him. He's mighty, he's good, and he's rich in mercy.
Those are some of the reasons people don't open up and share, but also some things that we need to understand if we're in that place right now, we're not opening up to our church family about a suffering that we're in the middle of right now. Sometimes we want to share our struggles with people who are at arm's length from our daily lives, people we don't see a few times a week. Sometimes we intentionally peter a counselor, a friend from another church, a friend or family member who lives further away, and there's nothing wrong with that. But let me say this - there's nothing wrong with it if it's in addition to someone or multiple people in your local church. Now, why do I say that?
Praise God. That's great. But do it in addition to someone in your local church who sees you regularly and can pray for you and check up on you and care for you.
Because being your own counselor can be very, very dangerous. 'Anybody want to be honest enough to say Amen? Yes, the Lord desires to speak to each of us directly, but sometimes we're unwilling to hear. Sometimes we're unable to hear. And for those reasons, it is wise to walk through challenging seasons of life with mature brothers and sisters.
It's especially wise. Remember Jeremiah 79. It says, "The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable. Who can understand it?"
If you are a mature saint, then you have realized it's never good. When you say, I'll just deal with this myself. I'll just figure this out myself. I don't care what kind of personality type you have. I don't care how brilliant you think you are.
Let me tell you a universal truth, and you can write this down. Our thinking becomes distorted far more easily when we are isolated. Our thinking becomes distorted far more easily when we are isolated. Don't deceive yourself. Don't lie to other people.
Don't coat it as like, "Oh, just me and Jesus are going to work through this."
Your thinking becomes distorted when you become isolated because you don't think about Jesus all the time. You don't think about Him twenty-four-seven. And, unbelievably, sometimes we even latch on to ideas that aren't from God and convince ourselves they are because we really like how they sound. "Oh, I love how that word from God is exactly what I wanted to be true in this moment." It's just amazing how that happens.
Have you realized this about yourself yet? I pray you have. And if you haven't, I urge you to recognize this about yourself. Have you recognized how easy it is to convince yourself of ridiculous things for which there is no evidence? When you isolate yourself, how many arguments have you won in the shower?
Right, should have said this. Then I'll tell them, I'll do this. You know, if anyone heard you, they'd be like, you're out of your mind. And yet, no matter how many times we preach it, we see believers do this over and over and over again, over and over again. And I say this in love, it drives BJ and I crazy.
It drives us crazy. And I'll tell you why. We hear this from Christians all the time. "Yeah, I'm dealing with a lot, so I won't be at church on Sunday." "Oh, where's so and so? I haven't seen them around." "Oh, they're just going through some stuff right now, so they're not coming to home group or church for a while." "I've had a lot going on, and so I'm going to rest instead of being part of the life of the church." Here's why it's frustrating, out of love...
Please hear me. It's frustrating because this is ground-level, Kindergarten-level Christianity that we're talking about. Kindergarten-level. Do not isolate yourself. God - are you hearing me? God says you need fellowship. God says you need your church family. God says that if you seek Him, he will give you what you need rest, energy, peace, hope. How do you seek him? By doing what he's called you to.
Don't be your own counselor. Why? Because we give ourselves terrible advice. Terrible advice. We convince ourselves that everything's going to get better if we somehow isolate ourselves.
But all that happens is that Satan comes after us like a lion chasing down a zebra who's been separated from the herd. Oh, a straggler one on their own, ripe for the picking because now they've got no protection. And then when we're isolated, satan attacks us with baseless thoughts like, hey, nobody cares about you. Nobody can understand what you're going through. Nobody's missing you.
It's never going to get better. And in our weakened, suffering state, our thinking becomes distorted far more easily when we're isolated. So please hear me on this - stop doing that. Stop doing that.
Grow up and become mature in Christ. Lean into fellowship. This is what mature Christians do. Lean into fellowship when you don't feel like it because you're actually mature enough to understand that you need it. Don't be someone who skips church and Paul's back from fellowship at the time when you need it the most.
Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived other than Jesus, said, a fool's way is right in his own eyes. But whoever listens to counsel, to wise counsel, is wise. Seeking counsel and sharing your sufferings in a vulnerable way, it requires humility - a lot of it - which is probably why it doesn't come easy for most of us. But there's a promise in God's word that has haunted me in a good way over the past few years and that has profoundly impacted my life. In James four six, we read, o"Gd resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. I have a choice. You have a choice. We can be proud, and we can hold on to our false image of having it all together, and God will resist us. Now, what does that mean?
I don't know exactly, but I know it's not good! I know I don't want God resisting me. And I know it means things aren't going to get better. Or we can humble ourselves, admit we need the help and support and ministry of our church family, and God will give us grace. And my goodness is the grace of God amazing when he pours it out on you.
It does miracles for the state of your spirit and the condition of your mind. Can I tell you from experience that God always does something good? When I humble myself and choose to share a struggle I'm having with a brother in the faith? Always. I don't have one time where I'm like, oh, man, I regret doing that.
It's always good. And it's not because they have the perfect response, it's not because they have the perfect advice, or they have an answer available right away for me. It's because they point me to Christ. They lead me to Christ in prayer, and Christ our out his grace on me, and I find myself able to hear Him with greater clarity. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. When we humble ourselves and go to God's Word, seek Him in prayer and seek counsel from mature believers and prayer from them.
The Lord speaks. He does. He moves. He ministers.
Do not let your emotions rule your decision-making.
General George S. Patton, Jr. Paraphrased Shakespeare when he famously wrote, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all." When we're going through a trial, we're tired, we're beaten down. And in that state, it is so easy for us to lose discipline.
And yes, discipline is the right word. It is the root of the Word disciple. The Christian life is disciplined in that Christian living is, at its core, constantly saying no to the momentary desires of the flesh and instead saying yes to the leading of the spirit. It is that discipline over and over and over and over and over again. But when we're fatigued, we just want to give in to our fleshly emotions and desires, don't we?
The mature Christian understands that discipline is refusing to allow our actions to be dictated by your emotions. Refusing to let your actions be dictated by your momentary desires. "I don't feel like going to church. I don't feel like sharing this difficult thing with my brothers or sisters, but I know it's what I need to do. I know it's good for me, so I will do what I know is good rather than what would feel good in this moment."
That's discipline. That's mature Christian conduct. And here's a lie that Satan loves to tell you in those moments: "You don't want to go to church or home group. You'll just have to put on a happy face and pretend to be excited. And we both know you don't have the energy for that right now."
And it's a lie because you don't have to put on a happy face. You should spend some time with me. I'll model this for you, OK? You can be honest. You can be real.
God already knows you're not fooling Him in your life. There will be some Sundays when all you can do is get yourself to church. You're such a mess, you can't even sing. That's okay. We'll sing for you.
All you have to do is just agree in your spirit. With what we're singing, you won't be able to focus for the whole message. That's okay. God's word is supernatural. He will build your faith and minister to you just because you're in the room while His Word is being declared.
And the Holy Spirit will speak to your soul regardless of the subject of the message. You can ask for prayer and just say, "I'm a mess right now. I'm just going through it. That's all I can bring myself to share right now." Do that. Humble yourself and remember God's promise. He'll pour out His grace on you. He'll pour out His grace upon you.
And by the way, that's yet another reason why we sing the praises of God together, why we declare his goodness and celebrate his faithfulness with song out loud. It's because there are always brothers and sisters among us who desperately need those reminders. Sometimes it'll be you. So when you have the strength to sing, sing because you're not just singing for yourself. You're singing for those who are too weak to sing in that moment, you're singing over them.
It's not just about you. What we do when we get together is about the Church family.
When we're fatigued and we're going through it, isn't it so easy to justify sin? It's so easy, man, I deserve to indulge in this sin. How else am I supposed to cope with this? Nobody can judge me. They don't know what I'm going through.
They're not going through what I'm going through. Watch out. Peter says, "Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary, the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for anyone he can devour." Our coping mechanisms are never more tempting than when we're struggling to cope.
All we have to do is look at where we run for relief when we're struggling to cope. Parenthetically this is why I counsel anybody who has wrestled with any type of coping mechanism that isn't Christ to build defenses in times of peace. You can't build your defenses when you're under attack, it's too late. You must build your defenses in times of peace. And when it comes to coping mechanisms, that means doing everything you can to strip them of their power in advance.
Paul counseled the Romans to make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. In other words, what Paul is saying is, "Don't prepare things for when you know you're going to want to sin in the future. Don't set aside provisions so that you can sin using them later in the future." If you have a history of alcoholism, don't keep alcohol in your house anywhere, for any reason. Don't make any provision for the flesh if you've wrestled with porn addiction in the past, don't have any device in your home that doesn't have accountability software on it.
Don't keep that old software in a drawer for a rainy day just in case you want to sin and indulge the flesh later. Build your defenses in times of peace. Ask yourself this question. This is a brutal question that I will ask people sometimes, and it's brutal. The question is, "So, if you were loving to try and indulge your sinful coping mechanism today, later today, tomorrow, how would you do it?"
"How would you do it?" And then figure out what you can do to make that impossible or as difficult as humanly possible. That's building your defenses in times of peace. Why? Because you know and understand that sooner or later an assault is coming and when it comes, it'll be too late to build your defenses.
Then watch out for sin when you're struggling to cope and you're going through a trial. Build your defenses in advance. Get around. Fellowship with your church family as much as possible. Get prayer as much as possible.
Confess when you're struggling with temptation and be disciplined. We will not be exempt from the natural consequences of sin just because we're going through a trial. Please hear me on this. I'll say it again: We will not be exempt from the natural consequences of sin just because we're going through a trial.
Neither God nor Satan is going to be like, you're going through a lot right now. So, I'm not going to cause you to deal with anything from that sin. We'll just let it go. It's not going to happen. Christ will forgive you if you repent.
But repentance does not include the alleviation of the natural consequences of your sin.
I'm going to close. I know it's semi abruptly, but we're going to continue next week. Just talking through some practical issues about suffering, but I'm going to close by just reminding us of some key points from today's study. Number one, more than anything, invite your church family into your suffering. Invite them in.
If that doesn't come naturally to you, you're like, oh, I'm not that kind of person. You're not special. It doesn't come naturally to anybody. Let me share something potentially sensitive and embarrassing about myself and put myself in a highly vulnerable position. That's not a personality type.
Nobody does that, okay? Anytime you do this, you are acting against our fundamental human nature. That's why humility is so hard. It doesn't come naturally to any of us. That's why vulnerability is so hard.
Series: A Theology of Suffering...Speaker: Jeff Thompson
It is critical that we correctly diagnose the cause of our suffering so that we can respond appropriately. In this message, we’ll look at the four primary causes of suffering in the life of the believer, and how we should respond in each instance.
So, as I mentioned last week, we're taking a break from our study through the Book of Acts to talk about the subject of suffering. We have a much higher percentage per capita than most churches do of people in our church who are suffering in some way with a trial, emotional, mental, physical, infirmity, something like that. And so, we wanted to tackle the question, what should suffer? Suffering loved like in the life of a Christian? And last week we learned that humanity's collective sin is why pain, suffering, and evil exist in our broken world.
And we were reminded just how good God is, because instead of leaving us in the mess that we had made, he entered our suffering, laid down his life to provide hope, restore our relationship with Him, and offer a gloriously different eternity from the death that we were destined for. Next week, we're going to talk about some practical steps we can take as individuals to endure a season of suffering. Well, as a follower of Jesus, but also as part of a local church, this week we're going to talk about diagnosing the cause of our sufferings. And while talking about remedies and solutions for suffering is good, any doctor will tell you it's vital to first diagnose the problem before you begin to treat it. Otherwise, you may end up taking cough drops for a headache or a sleep aid for tendinitis in the same way.
And this is going to be your first fill-in. When we are suffering, it is wise to identify the specific cause of our suffering. When we are suffering, it is wise to identify the specific cause of our suffering. Last week, we talked about why suffering exists at all. This week, we want to talk about identifying the specific cause of our individual sufferings.
Because how we need to respond to our suffering depends entirely upon the cause of our suffering. And I want to suggest today there are four primary causes of suffering in the believer's life. First, suffering can be caused by living in a fallen world. If you missed last week's message, I hope you'll go online and listen to it, because it's important we live in a fallen world. And because we do, things like cancer exist, car crashes happen, people do evil things to other people, spouses cheat and walk out on each other. Hardworking people lose their jobs. Stuff breaks down. I've seen many Christians experience angst as they try to understand why something bad has happened in their lives when sometimes the answer is just that we live in a fallen world where bad things happen. And there's nothing more to it than that Christian. We must understand that this is not heaven.
This is not heaven. We should not expect this to be the place where everything is right and good and goes the way it should. It's not. We're not there yet. Praise God.
One day we will be in that place and that's why for 2000 years heaven has filled the heart of the believer with hope. For those who belong to Christ, this life is not the end. And so, when things don't work out great down here, that's okay. That's okay because we know where we're going. There's a reason that slaves who loved the Lord didn't write songs about overcoming in this life.
They wrote I'll fly away, O glory, I'll fly away when I die, hallelujah. By and by I'll fly away. Many Christians also don't realize that the Bible does not teach that everything happens for a reason. Do you know this? The Bible doesn't say that.
In Romans 8:28, our brother Paul tells us that all things work together for the ultimate good of those who love God. In other words, whether we're going through a good time or the worst time of our lives, God can and does do something good practically, spiritually, emotionally, in your life, or in the life of someone around you. God will do something good even when things are bad. And that's profound because it's a promise from God that the believer's suffering is never meaningless, never meaningless. Nothing is wasted.
The non-believer has no such promise. And unless their suffering leads them to Christ, their suffering is meaningless. It's meaningless. When we suffer from living in a fallen world, we should take heart that God is working something good in every circumstance. We should rejoice in the hope of heaven and follow the counsel of our brother Peter to cast all our cares upon Jesus because he cares for us.
Our God is as Paul described him, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.
Secondly, suffering can be caused - write this down - suffering can be caused by the natural consequences of our actions. Ouch. Suffering can be caused by the natural consequences of our actions. The Bible talks about the principle of loving and reaping. This is what Paul told the Galatians: "Don't be deceived. God is not mocked for whatever a person, sows he will also reap." This is a law that God has established in the universe. Our actions have consequences for better or worse. The Bible teaches that sin leads to death. And not only does sin lead to death eternally for those who reject Christ, but sin produces death in any area of our life where we allow it to reign any area of our life where we allow sin to call the shots. Even if we're a Christian.
If we're experiencing suffering and pain in any area of our life, we must honestly examine ourselves and ask questions like, "Am I obeying the Lord in this area of my life? Is there sin in this area of my life that I need to repent and turn away from?" If we're not obeying the Lord in that area of life, if we need to repent, we're fooling ourselves by looking for an alternative explanation for our suffering. Because the truth is, we're just looking for a way to have the suffering end where we still get to hold on to our precious sin. That's what I'm really looking for. A second opinion? Yeah. Is there a version of this where I can just keep loving this sin, but also have the suffering it's causing stop. That's what I'm really looking for. Because if our sin is the cause of our suffering, then only dealing with that sin will alleviate our suffering.
If we're suffering because we are experiencing the natural consequences of our sin, we need to repent. It's that simple. Don't grab someone and say, "Oh, can you pray for me, brother or sister, that the suffering would end?" Don't do that when you know the reason it's happening is because you're sinning. The solution is to repent and turn away from it.
Sometimes we have repented of that sin. We have turned away from it. But those natural consequences don't just vanish when we repent. Wouldn't that be great if they did? Right?
But they don't. Repentance brings rest and peace to our souls and comfort to our minds. It draws us closer to the God who comforts us. It prevents there being this barrier of sin between us and God. But oftentimes the natural consequences of our sins are felt for a long time, sometimes even the rest of our lives.
He died so that we could have the option to not just fall into it over and over and over again and have our lives destroyed by it. And he died to lead us into an eternity where we will be completely free from it. So, if you're suffering from the natural consequences of sins that you've already repented for, you've already turned away from, let that suffering remind you of the devastating effects of sin. Let it cause you to hate sin in your life and grow in your love for Jesus, who sets you free from the power of sin to control your life and let it grow. Your longing for the time and the place where you will be completely free from sin.
Now, other times, the issue isn't sin, it's just foolishness. We just make dumb decisions sometimes. And those dumb decisions, bad decisions that aren't necessarily sinful, well, they also have natural consequences. If the check engine light comes on in your car and you ignore it for nine months, we've got no business questioning God when the mechanic says, yeah, this is really bad. If you had brought it in when the light first came on, it would have been a much smaller repair.
Oh, Lord. Why me? The Lord has a word for you. It's maintenance. That's the word.
Okay? If you get fired from your job because you're late 80% of the time, you're not a victim of living in a fallen world. You shouldn't look up to the heavens and say, "Why me, God? Is it because I'm a Christian?" You're just a bad employee.
That's why you got fired. Okay? If you're suffering because you keep making foolish and bad decisions, then stop doing that. Stop hanging around with people who help you make bad decisions. Stop going to places where it's easy to make bad decisions.
Stop listening to people who give bad advice. Become wise. And how does one become wise? Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived other than Jesus wrote, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and discipline."
Wisdom begins by submitting your life to Christ as Lord, meaning that what he says goes. David, whom the Bible calls a man after God's own heart, wrote, "The instruction of the Lord is perfect. Renewing one's life. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy. Making the inexperienced wise..." I love that.
Making the inexperienced wise. Here's what that means. It doesn't matter if you're ten years old. Wisdom is found in the word of God. It doesn't matter if you were raised with parents who weren't all that great, people in your life who didn't set a good example.
Read the word, study the word, learn it, know it, understand it, apply it to your life, and you will become wise. God promises it. And our brother James wrote, if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to him. Ask the Lord for wisdom. If you desire to please and obey the Lord and walk in his ways, and you ask Him for wisdom so that you can do that, he'll give it to you.
He will give it to you. Now. Thirdly, suffering can be caused - write this down - by the will of God. Suffering can be caused by the will of God. While we may not like it, God will sometimes use suffering as a tool.
God's greatest concern is not our comfort. It's making us more like Christ. God's greatest concern is not our comfort. It's making us more like Christ. And that process is called sanctification.
And sanctification is good for us. Being made more like Jesus is good for us because becoming more like Jesus means more joy, more peace, and more love in my life. Scripture says that Jesus, when he was on the earth, was anointed with the oil of gladness more than all his fellows. He's the happiest man who ever lived. It's the path to the most fulfilled life you can have on the earth.
Becoming more like Jesus - sanctification - means you'll live more profitably. You'll live with greater purpose because you'll be serving God, storing up treasure in heaven, devoting your life to things that will matter for eternity. And becoming more like Jesus means that God will entrust you with greater responsibilities when you reign with Him in the ages to come. Now, God may cause us to experience suffering for the purpose of purification. We know that God wants us to become more like Jesus.
But how do we actually know if we're becoming more like Jesus? You've probably heard the old illustration that we're all like a tube of toothpaste. When the squeeze is on, what comes out? Whatever is inside the tube. And I have to just ask here just to know if I'm the only one. Does anybody else go to war with their spouse over getting the last bit of toothpaste out the tube so that you're not the one who has to get the new tube?
Or is this only me and my wife? It's just us. Okay, I'll let you know. It's serious in our house. Like, you will hear, like, grunting from the bathroom, because the winner is the person who forces the other person to get the new tube of toothpaste.
So... We really are that cheap? Yes. But when the squeeze is on whatever is in the tube, that's what comes out. And so too, for us, when we are placed under pressure and under stress in life, whatever comes out of us in those circumstances reveals what's really inside of us. The Bible talks about this process being like gold.
That is purified. And the way gold was traditionally purified is by being passed through a fire heated up to incredible temperatures where the impurities, called "the dross", they rise to the surface as the gold melted, and then the goldsmith can just skim them off, loving only purified gold. We need seasons in life where it is revealed whether we truly believe what we claim to believe. And those seasons come when the squeeze is on.
And these are not tests from God so that he can learn where our faith is really at. He's God. He knows. These are tests to allow us to see ourselves clearly, to take stock of where our faith really is, to find out what we truly believe. I've had trials in my life that I've handled well.
I've walked by faith unwaveringly and I've seen God inevitably come through, and I treasure those experiences. But I've also had trials that I had to look back on with shame and embarrassment because I had little faith. And I allowed myself to be overwhelmed with worry and anxiety. But those times built in me, and they can build in you a determination to walk through the next trial with faith. Those failures put a resolve in me because I didn't want to be a man of weak faith the next time.
Before Jesus was arrested, he told Peter, "Look out. Satan has asked to sift you like wheat." And the implication was that permission had been granted by God Lord. Peter told him, "I'm ready to go with you both to prison and to death." Peter would soon learn that wasn't true. The Lord allowed Peter to be squeezed so that Peter could get a reality check of where his faith really was.
And you know, Peter would deny even knowing Jesus three times at the time when Jesus was most alone. After his resurrection, Jesus forgives and restores Peter. But how did Peter get over the shame and embarrassment of that failure? By knowing there would be another chance, there's going to be another trial, another test in the future. And Peter determined that next time he would be faithful to Jesus to the very end, whatever it cost.
And he was. He was. Church tradition holds that Peter died by being crucified for refusing to disown Jesus, except that Peter asked to be crucified upside down because he didn't consider himself worthy of dying in the same manner as his Savior. God will use suffering to remove impurities from our lives and from our character. Write this down.
God may use suffering for the purpose of preparation. Preparation. When Jesus told Peter that Satan had been permitted to sift him like wheat, Jesus also told Peter, "But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail and you, when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." Jesus told Peter he was about to go through a difficult trial, but he would come through it in the end. And when he did, he would have learned something.
He would have been changed in a profound way that would enable him to strengthen and encourage his brothers in a way that he couldn't before his trial. As Peter learned more about his own weakness, he would become more gracious in dealing with others in their weaknesses. And as he experienced the grace and forgiveness of God after a spectacular failure, he would be able to encourage others with the grace and forgiveness offered by God. Peter was being prepared through a trial. In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul writes, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.
He comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction through the comfort we ourselves receive from God. God will use suffering to prepare us for future ministry. God may cause us to experience suffering. For discipline. For discipline.
You know, when I take my kids to the park, I don't step in and discipline somebody else's kids. I really want to sometimes, but I don't. I might think, really?
Okay, but I don't. You know why? They're not my kids. They're not my kids. But if one of my kids is being unkind or having a bad attitude, I'm going to step in and discipline them.
Why? Because I care about who they are becoming. I want them to have healthy, fulfilling friendships and relationships in life. And so, I want them to know how to treat people the right way, so they sow good things and then reap good things. A loving parent disciplines their children for the good of their children.
Because even though you're probably loving, it's not that sin issue. Even though you're probably working really hard to convince yourself it's not that sin issue, it's that sin issue. That's what it is. And know this a good parent doesn't drop the issue when they know it's bringing destruction into their child's life. God is the perfect father, and so he's not going to drop the issue either.
He's not going to just move on if you choose to be stubborn in your sin, and he's not going to run out of energy. He's not he can do it all day. So, if you're experiencing suffering because the Lord is disciplining you, welcome His correction. Receive it, repent, and change where he's calling you to change. As I mentioned earlier, becoming more like Jesus means you'll be entrusted with greater responsibilities when you reign with Christ in eternity.
And God is working now to purify and prepare us for those responsibilities that await us in 2 Timothy, it says, "If we died with Him, we will also live with Him. If we endure, we will also reign with Him." Church, we really are going to reign with Christ. It's really going to happen. First, we will reign on the Earth for a thousand years when Jesus rules as King, and then we will reign with Him into eternity in a way more glorious than we can imagine.
We all understand the reality and necessity of temporary pain for the sake of greater benefit. Later examples abound in our lives. The temporary pain of exercising for greater health. The temporary pain of loving for retirement to have a financially secure future. The temporary pain of a burn on a child's finger, a small one, so that they learn that fire is serious and dangerous.
We all understand that not all pain is bad. Sometimes pain is necessary and important. It's for our benefit. And yet we also understand none of that makes the pain any less real in the moment. It's just that we recognize the future benefits of that temporary pain make it worthwhile.
And our earthly loves are like a grain of sand compared to the beach of eternity. And knowing that, let me ask you would a genuinely good God prioritize our earthly present or our infinite eternity? What would he do? If he wants the best for us, the answer is obvious. In the same way, a good parent raises their child with adulthood in mind.
Our perfect and loving Heavenly Father parents, his children, you and me, with our spiritual adulthood, our eternal destiny in mind. And when the Lord parents us with eternity in mind, my prayer is that our response would be, do it, Lord. Do it. Because I would rather benefit in eternity than this earthly temporary life. I would rather be great in Your kingdom than here on the earth.
We want Christ to be glorified in the way we respond to suffering. So, if you need to repent, repent. If you need to become wise, ask the Lord for wisdom and search the Scriptures with the appropriate level of urgency. If you need to trust God, rest in Him, and cast Your cares upon Him, do that, and no matter what kind of suffering you're going through, praise God for the comfort of his spirit, the power of his blood, and the hope of heaven. With that, would you bow your head and close your eyes.
Let's pray together. Jesus, we are so thankful for the truth of Your Word and for the guidance of the Scriptures. Lord, our first desire, Lord, is that we would not deceive ourselves in any way. And so, Jesus, we want to invite you by the power of Your Spirit to examine our lives, to search the depths of our spirits, and as David prayed, see if there is any impure way in us, any area of our lives that is not submitted to you as it should be. Jesus, please speak to us and please convict us if we are in sin anywhere.
And Lord Jesus, if any among us are stubbornly holding on to sin, Lord, I pray that you would convict them powerfully by our Spirit. Not so that they can feel bad, but so that they can be set free from the power of sin so that they can cease sowing seeds that we know will lead to destruction in their lives. We don't want that for our brothers and sisters. So, Lord, speak to us and where we need to repent, Lord, help us to do that. Give us the faith to do that.
Remind every person here of Your goodness, of Your kindness, of Your grace, and that everything you call us to do is for our good. Lord, I pray as well for anyone who is just wrestling with making foolish decisions, unwise decisions. Lord, help us to be humble in our need for you, in our need for wisdom that comes from Your Spirit and from Your Word. Help us to seek it with the desperation warranted and help us to seek it from those who are wise, Lord, that we might live as wise men and women. And then, Jesus, for those who are suffering from living in a fallen world, for those who have repented and turned away from their sin, but are still dealing with the natural consequences, for those who are being purified and prepared through suffering.
Right now, Lord, I think of Your Word and Peter's exhortation to cast all our cares upon you because You care for us. And Lord, I recognize that so often we just don't know how to do that. We don't know what that means. And so, Holy Spirit, would you minister to us as we seek you in this coming time, and just as we desire to be full of Your Spirit, would you help us to release burdens that we should not be holding on to. Would you help us to receive your comfort, to receive your peace, to find our load lightened as the one who bore all of our sin and shame carries our burdens as well?
Thank you, Jesus, that by Your stripes we are healed. And so, we pray that you would help us to receive that healing and to receive that peace. Jesus, we love you, we bless you. It's in Your name we pray. Amen.
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Why Does Suffering Exist?....Date:8/20/23
Series: A Theology of Suffering...Speaker: Jeff Thompson
One of the most frequently raised objections to Christianity is the problem of evil. How can a good God exist if there is so much pain and suffering in the world? I this message, we’ll explore what the Bible says about this classic existential dilemma.
If you're not aware, our church has a disproportionately high number of people who are dealing with infirmities, diseases, illnesses, and sicknesses. There are many suffering in our church in other ways as well. And suffering, as I just indicated, takes many forms. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee that everybody is going to deal with suffering in their life and will do so many times.
But not everybody deals with suffering the same way. Some handle it better than others. For some, it brings out the best in them, making them more like Jesus and serving as a positive witness to those around them. For others, it brings out the worst in them, embittering them, filling them with anger, resentment, depression, and making them just someone who's toxic to be around. The question we want to tackle in this new miniseries is what should suffering look like in the life of a Christian?
What should it look like? What do Jesus and His Word tell us about how we should view suffering and how we should walk through it? And to answer the question, how should we view suffering? We need to begin by tackling one of the most frequent objections to theism to the existence of God, commonly referred to as the problem of evil. It's the question behind questions like why does suffering exist?
Why is there pain and evil in the world? If God is good, then why does he allow all the suffering and evil that we see in the world? Either he must not be powerful enough to do anything about it, he must not be real, or he must not care. Those are big questions. They're really big questions.
If you're a Christian, you need to know the answers to these kinds of questions. Perhaps you still have these questions as a Christian, but you're afraid to ask them. You don't need to be, because there are really good answers. Not easy answers, but good and true answers. Clear answers.
Pain and suffering feel inherently wrong to pretty much everybody when they show up in a major way in our lives or the lives of those we love, there's this underlying feeling that things should not be this way. Something has gone wrong. And so, we mourn, we lament, we grieve, we get angry when suffering interrupts our lives and the lives of those we love. When you think about it, that's very odd, because in the secular worldview, pain and suffering have been part of life since the world began. They are, by definition, normal, unextraordinary.
And yet, as a species, we have not adopted the attitude of "C'est la vie," that's life another day, another tragedy. When it comes to pain and suffering, isn't it strange? When someone we love is suffering, we don't say, hey, you know, statistically this was inevitable. We don't do that. But it makes no sense for us to view pain and suffering as tragic when it is, by definition, normal to be expected.
I suggest the reason pain and suffering feel so wrong to us is because pain and suffering were never meant to exist. Our soul knows deep down that things were not meant to be like this. Something has indeed gone very wrong with humanity and with our world. This is going to be your first fill-in. We're going to go on a journey today.
Write this down. Our souls testify that pain and suffering should not exist. And something has gone wrong in our world. Our souls know deep down that things should not be this way. So, let's talk about why suffering exists.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And it goes on to describe Jesus creating everything the sun, the stars, plants, animals. And as he's doing this step by step, he's looking at his creation and he's declaring, this is good. And we can't even begin to fathom the depths of what it meant. When God said of the earth, this is good, he was saying that all of creation was in a state that the Hebrews call shalom.
It means a state of peace, a state of balance, a state of rest, a state of beauty. Everything as it should be - shalom animals were herbivores. There was no savagery in nature. It was good on a level and in a way we cannot comprehend.
No mosquitoes go swimming in the ocean. There's no sand hidden somewhere in your body when you get out the water. Everything's perfect. And into this beautiful, perfect creation, God places the whole point of his creation, man and woman made in his image to be his sons and daughters. And when he looked at them, he declared, they are good.
There was apparently no death and there was no work in the sense that nothing was laborious or cumbersome. The only tasks that they had to do were interesting and joyful and life-giving. And they felt like they had more energy when they had completed the task than when they had begun. And they didn't have to work to eat. They would just grab fruit off whatever tree was near them.
And it was all good. It was all satisfying. It was all nutritious. This was a world so good, they didn't even need pants. I say that jokingly.
But this world was a world without body issues as well. It was a world without self-consciousness. It was a world without lust. It was completely free of all that junk. So, write this down.
The world Jesus gave humanity was good. And when we say good, we mean perfect. The world Jesus gave humanity was good. It was perfect. And God's only instructions to Adam and Eve were to have dominion over the earth and to multiply.
God created man to steward and rule over all the creatures and resources of the Earth. God put man. He put us in charge of the earth. He gave it to us. Jesus gave the title deed, so to speak, of his creation to us and said, Rule over the Earth, be blessed, have lots of babies, which is a wonderful assignment in a world where pregnancy and childbirth are completely painless.
And I want to make sure you don't miss this, so I'm going to say it again. The world Jesus gave humanity was perfect. It was perfectly good. So, if I give you something precious and beautiful to take care of, and I go on a journey and I come back and it's broken, what does that mean? Well, it means something went wrong on your watch.
Something went wrong on your watch. But before we get to what happened, I want to remind us of why God chose to create us. The Bible tells us that God is complete in every sense of the word. He lacks nothing. He needs nothing.
And he's not made more complete by having anything added to Himself. He's not lonely. He's not insecure. He's not bored. He is entirely self-sufficient within the Trinity.
Now, think of a married couple that doesn't have kids yet. Can I tell you what converging they're not having? They're not saying, you know what? We've got too much spare money. We need to have some kids.
They're not saying, you know, I was thinking, like, we're banking a solid 8 hours of sleep every night. We got to do something about that. Let's have some kids. They're not doing that. They're not saying, man, I am so sick of all this free time.
We got to do something about this, babe. Let's have some kids. Nobody even thinks that. But there's something inside us that wants to share our lives with our own children. There's something that says, wouldn't it be cool to have little versions of ourselves to bless and to share life with?
Wouldn't it be wonderful to invest in them and watch them grow and love them? We don't need kids. But kids are a blessing to us, and we get that from being made in the image of our Heavenly Father, because that's why God made Adam and Eve, and that's why God made you and me. He doesn't need us, but incredibly, he can be blessed by us. So write this down.
We were created because God wanted to share Himself and His goodness with his children. That's why we're here. God wanted to share Himself and His goodness with his children. And let me tell you, my kids are a blessing to me. Their hugs, hearing them say, I love you, dad, or when they're teenagers, settling for it.
What's up, Dad? Watching them grow, sharing experiences with them, watching them love and serve others. They bless me so much. I'm so grateful for them. But you know what wouldn't bless me?
If instead of six kids, I had six robots who were programmed to hug me and say, I love you, dad, regularly. Even if they did all the same stuff that my kids do. Now, why wouldn't that bless me? If they were doing all the same things my kids do, what would be the difference? We all know intrinsically, don't we, that the difference is free will.
The difference is choice. Affection and relationship with a being who has free will is significant on an incalculably higher level than affection and relationship with an automaton. A being that has no control over its behaviors or actions. A being that is simply following its programming. For love to exist, there must be the choice to not love.
If the option to not love does not exist, then the option to love cannot exist. There has to be a choice. If affection and relationship are to have any meaning at all, a person must have free will. We all get this, even if we've never been able to articulate it with words. God gave Adam and Eve free will by creating what Genesis 29 describes - the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden as well as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
So, God placed two trees in the middle of the garden that we commonly call Eden. One was the Tree of Life. They could eat from that all they wanted and assumedly experience benefits we cannot imagine. We don't know what those benefits were, but we can trust that they were amazing. But there was also a second tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And God placed man in a truly good world and gave him authority over it. And through the presence of the two trees, God gave man free will. The choice to love, obey, trust, and serve God or not. In the warning God gives to Adam, he doesn't say, if you eat the forbidden fruit, I will resent you forever and make your life miserable. He doesn't say, if you eat the forbidden fruit, you'll be enlightened by the whole truth.
And I can't have that? No. What does God say? He says on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. At this point, Adam and Eve could not know what that meant.
But they knew it would be terrible. The result of disobeying God. Rejecting God would not be a telling-off or a slap on the wrist. The result would be catastrophic death. Inevitable and unavoidable.
Death would enter creation and affect everything. So, make a note of this. God gave humanity the free will to follow him and choose life or reject him and choose death. Reject him and choose death.
And you might think that this is going to be God inflicting death upon them, but that's not what God is saying. God is the only source of everything good, including life, love, peace, joy, hope, goodness, all these good things. But the only way to be connected to the source of those things is to serve Him and worship Him and follow Him as Lord. When you say, I don't want to be connected to you God, you become disconnected from the only source of everything good. And all there is on the other side is death.
God doesn't have to inflict death upon you. Death is all there is outside of God. You choose death when you choose to reject God. Those are the only two options. That's what God is saying.
He's saying if you choose to reject me, if you choose to disobey me, you are by default chosen death. And it will come for you, and you will not escape. The Bible says that God is love. God is the supreme being and his supreme ethic, his supreme characteristic is love. And God is so devoted to the ethic of love that even the angels in heaven, in a way we can't fully understand, have free will.
He gives them a choice. How do we know that? Well, because one of only two archangels in heaven was a being named Lucifer. And with his free will, Lucifer attempted an insurrection, a coup to make himself equal with God. To make a long story short, it did not go well.
He was cast out of heaven by the other archangel, Michael, and fell to the earth as Satan. And you know what happened next. Here's what the Bible says. Genesis three, verse four. No, you will certainly not die.
The serpent said to the woman. In fact, God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. So, they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Suddenly, by disobeying God, their eyes are opened to all the ways they could disobey God that they had never considered before. Sin enters them and, in that moment, they become ashamed and aware of their nakedness, and their innocence is lost. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden.
The man replied, though the Romans you gave to be with me. She gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate. So, the Lord asked the woman, what have you done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. Write this down.
This is what happened. Adam and Eve chose to believe Satan, the deceiver over Jesus, their creator.
Even though God had only ever been good to them, only ever done good for them. In a moment, they chose to believe that God was the liar and Satan was the one telling the truth. In a tragic irony, Satan deceived man with the same lie. He was deceived with the belief that he should be God. It led to the downfall of Satan and the same wicked desire, the desire to be one's own God led to our downfall.
And immediately things began to unravel. Adam and Eve became self-conscious and ashamed of their nakedness. They felt guilt over their sin and the mess they had made. And so, they ran away from God, hid from him. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed Satan and both refused to take responsibility for their sin.
Sin moved fast through creation, and everything began unraveling. Physical death entered the world for the first time because the universe was now subject to entropy -decay - and everything began slowly dying. People, animals, the earth, the universe itself, everything. Pain entered the world as pregnancy and childbirth became physically traumatic. Strife between husband and wife entered the world as their selfish pride and desires created constant difficulties in marriage.
Man now had to work and labor and strain to get the ground to produce food. It now felt like the earth was working against him as he battled thorns and weeds and thistles and felt his body ache. At the end of the day, animals began to eat each other, and man began to eat animals. And Adam and Eve would have to deal with the first murder, their son Cain, who would later murder their son Abel. Everything began to unravel when man invited sin into God's perfect creation.
Death has entered everything. It's entered our thinking, our actions, our DNA, everything. You remember how earlier I shared that God gave the title deed of the earth to man, so to speak? Well, when man chose to submit to the council of Satan rather than the council of God, something happened with that. In some mystical but very real way.
We gave the title deed of the earth to Satan by choosing to obey him instead of God.
In that moment, we collectively, as the human race, gave our rights over the earth and over our own lives to Satan. Write this down humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Many Christians have never heard this, and they don't understand that the Bible teaches this, but it does. Paul called Satan the God of this age, and Jesus called him the ruler of this world three times in the Gospel of John, when Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness.
At the beginning of Jesus' earthly ministry, do you remember what the final temptation was? Matthew's gospel says this the Devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, I will give you all these things if you will fall down and worship me. You can read that account in Matthew, Mark, and Luke's Gospels in each one. Jesus does not object to the validity of Satan's offer.
The man replied, though the woman you gave to be with me. She gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate. So, the Lord asked the woman, what have you done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. Write this down.
This is what happened. Adam and Eve chose to believe Satan, the deceiver over Jesus, their creator.
Even though God had only ever been good to them, only ever done good for them. In a moment, they chose to believe that God was the liar and Satan was the one telling the truth. In a tragic irony, Satan deceived man with the same lie. He was deceived with the belief that he should be God. It led to the downfall of Satan and the same wicked desire, the desire to be one's own God led to our downfall.
And immediately things began to unravel. Adam and Eve became self-conscious and ashamed of their nakedness. They felt guilt over their sin and the mess they had made. And so, they ran away from God, hid from him. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed Satan and both refused to take responsibility for their sin.
Sin moved fast through creation, and everything began unraveling. Physical death entered the world for the first time because the universe was now subject to entropy -decay - and everything began slowly dying. People, animals, the earth, the universe itself, everything. Pain entered the world as pregnancy and childbirth became physically traumatic. Strife between husband and wife entered the world as their selfish pride and desires created constant difficulties in marriage.
Man now had to work and labor and strain to get the ground to produce food. It now felt like the earth was working against him as he battled thorns and weeds and thistles and felt his body ache. At the end of the day, animals began to eat each other, and man began to eat animals. And Adam and Eve would have to deal with the first murder, their son Cain, who would later murder their son Abel. Everything began to unravel when man invited sin into God's perfect creation.
Death has entered everything. It's entered our thinking, our actions, our DNA, everything. You remember how earlier I shared that God gave the title deed of the earth to man, so to speak? Well, when man chose to submit to the council of Satan rather than the council of God, something happened with that. In some mystical but very real way.
We gave the title deed of the earth to Satan by choosing to obey him instead of God.
In that moment, we collectively, as the human race, gave our rights over the earth and over our own lives to Satan. Write this down humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Many Christians have never heard this, and they don't understand that the Bible teaches this, but it does. Paul called Satan the God of this age, and Jesus called him the ruler of this world three times in the Gospel of John, when Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness.
At the beginning of Jesus' earthly ministry, do you remember what the final temptation was? Matthew's gospel says this the Devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, I will give you all these things if you will fall down and worship me. You can read that account in Matthew, Mark, and Luke's Gospels in each one. Jesus does not object to the validity of Satan's offer.
Jesus doesn't say, what are you talking about? You don't own the
Isaiah 53 six says it like this we all went astray like sheep. We all have turned to our own way. What Isaiah was saying is that every single one of us has rejected God and done our own thing instead at some point and many times over. And while it may not sound like a big deal at first, the first time that we decided we wanted to do what we want instead of what God wanted us to do, in that moment, we were rejecting God just like Adam and Eve did. In that moment, we Derbe choosing to be our own God instead of serving and following God.
God gave us the right to choose. He gave us free will. Because love cannot be a forced action. It must be a choice. And every single one of us has chosen to reject God at some point in our lives, and some of us are still doing it right now.
So make a note of this at some point, we have all made the same decision Adam and Eve made. We've all made the same decision. And when Adam and Eve sinned, sin came rushing into the world, and with it came disease and sickness and pain and suffering and violence and all these things that we know deep down are wrong with the world. And here's the mind-blowing brutal truth. God has only given us what we wanted.
We wanted to rule over ourselves and be the masters of our universe. We wanted to reject God and set the rules for ourselves. But we can't sustain the universe by the breath of our mouth. And so, the universe is dying. We can't change the heart of a man from evil to good, and so evil persists in our world.
We were hopelessly corrupted by sin. And we cannot go back in time and undo our sinful choices because we would just make them again in another way. Where does pain and suffering come from? It comes from humanity, comes from people. It comes from the sin of the human race.
Because the downside of free will is the option to choose evil over good. If you want a universe in which love exists, then free will must exist too. And wherever there is free will, there will be those who choose evil over love and their decision will inflict violence, pain, horror, and suffering upon other people. And our collective sin has brought brokenness and sickness and disease to everyone. It's the price of free will.
It's the price of having the option to choose love. Genuine free will requires not only the option to choose but also that the consequences of our choices be allowed to unfold and affect the lives of others and indeed the world around us. And that is exactly what God gave to Adam and Eve. He gave them genuine free will, the ability to make choices that have consequences, repercussions that have resonated throughout history as a result. Write this down if you're not tracking with me yet.
Why not? One reason. We love money more than people. We've created incredible new technologies, ways to move goods from one side of the world to the other. But do we use it to solve poverty around the world?
No. We use it to find a new class of slaves in another part of the world where we don't have to see anything and people work for a dollar a day or less so that we can have horse stuff. That's what we did with the miracle of modern travel. New ways to enslave and exploit mankind. I was thinking about this this week.
Remember when social media was starting, and it was going to create better, more connected relationships? Remember that classic? Oh, man, what is it now? It's a tool for brainwashing the culture. It brings out the absolute worst in us.
It raises children to be violent, attention-seeking, narcissistic, depressed, anxious, and insecure. It rewards antisocial and selfish behavior and praises the ugliness in us. It invades our lives, learning all about us so we can be sold more things that we don't need and manipulated by those who want to change the way we think. We don't use any new technology to do anything noble. Hardly ever.
I've talked about this before. Our culture is so obsessed with sex, and its connection to technology is I just wait. Anytime there's a new technology, I just know they're just going to try and figure out how to use it for sex. The Internet? Oh good, we can have porn everywhere, all the time. Virtual reality goggles? Let's use it for porn. Robots? Oh good, we can help disabled people. Or we could make sex robots.
This is just the world we live in. So depraved. And it happens over and over and over again, and it's so glaring. The world that we have built is a mountain of evidence proving that collectively, humanity is not good. We are not naturally good.
We haven't just made a few little mistakes here and there. We're not good, and we can't make ourselves good. And technology does nothing to make us more good. On the contrary. In Psalm 53, David observed those about humanity the fool says in his heart, there is no God.
They are corrupt and they do vile deeds. There's no one who does good. God looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God. All have turned away. All alike have become corrupt.
There's no one who does good, not even one. That's what David saw when he looked at the world around him. By rejecting God, we broke ourselves and we broke our world. And we can see the effects of our collective sin every time we read or watch the news or hop online or just pay attention to the lives of those around us. God is perfect.
We've all spat in the face of our Maker and severed our relationship with Him. As human beings, we brought death into the world. And when we gave the Earth's title deed to Satan, we gave ourselves to Him too. And that meant that when we die, when we reach the end of our earthly lives, the only thing waiting for us apart from God is death. We can't go to be with the Lord, because our sin makes that impossible.
The Bible tells us the wages of sin is death.
God created us perfect and holy so that we could have a relationship with Him. He put us in paradise and gave us a life of joy and peace that would have lasted forever. If you want to see what God's plans were. You need only open your Bible and read about Eden in the first few chapters of Genesis. That's what God gave us.
That's the start God gave us. That was God's design. All of this, all the pain and suffering that we see around us, that's us. That's our choice. That's what our hands have wrought.
That's what we built by tearing down what God had built. Jesus said of Satan a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy and we put that thief in charge of the earth. We chose to partner with him instead of God and that left us, humans and the Earth in a hopeless position. We had free will, for without it love cannot exist. We used that free will to reject God, thus severing our relationship with Him in a way that we could never fix.
In choosing to reject God and align with Satan, we rejected good in favor of evil. And in rejecting God, we ushered in a new age of brokenness resulting in pain, suffering, violence, and everything that comes along with evil. People have historically, and people still do today, react to this reality in three primary ways. Firstly, some choose to blame God, questioning how he could be good if we're experiencing all this pain and suffering. But this view expresses ultimately a desire that God do away with free will because you can't rid the world of evil without doing away with free will.
It's a desire that God would intervene and remove evil, which can only be done by loving our option to choose evil, which would end free will and the option of love and make the possibility of genuinely choosing to love God impossible. This view also ignores the reality that this is all our Paul, it's all our fault. So, the first response is to blame God and say, hey, I just want God to come in and do away with all the evil. But nobody thinks, yeah, but most of the people making that objection don't understand that if God did that, he'd have to do away with them because they're not serving God, they're not loving God. They're worshipping a different God.
Those who are honest enough, as I said, to look at themselves and the world around us and conclude that we are in a hopeless situation outside of the grace of God. Because if God doesn't do something, we're doomed. Things are not getting better, and I want to ask you to slow down for a minute and answer this question. When you encounter pain and suffering, which view do you take? Do you blame God?
Do you doubt God, or are you broken before God? If you're suffering in an area of your life right now, what's your perspective? If you're honest, do you blame God? Do you doubt God? Or are you broken before God?
Here's the incredible thing. It's unbelievable, in fact. God did do something. He has done something. And the something he did is the reason that all of us are here this evening talking about it.
While it's true that a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, Jesus went on right after that to contrast what he would do to what Satan has done, saying, But I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance. And even though Isaiah began by saying we all went astray like sheep, we all have turned to our own way, the very next thing he wrote was, and the Lord has punished him that's Jesus for the iniquity of us all. And while it's true that the wages of sin is death, that verse ends with, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Jesus came to the Earth as a man and fully experienced, fully immersed Himself in the broken world that we had wrecked. He came and dwelt in his perfect world that we had ruined.
And throughout his life, he experienced all the evil, pain, and suffering that we ushered into his creation when we rejected Him. And Jesus did the most incredible thing. He came as a substitute and took our place in relationship to our Heavenly Father. He lived a perfect life without ever sinning, which none of us could do, and that made Him the only one qualified to die in our place as an acceptable substitute. And then he suffered and died in our place, revealing what we deserved for our rejection of God.
He suffered more than any person has ever suffered, and he experienced the full weight of death. He experienced having his body broken in the most brutal way possible. And he experienced separation from his father in heaven. And when his body was laid in the tomb, he was there in our place. If he had stayed there, if death had been able to hold Him, death would still be able to hold us.
So, write this down Jesus lived, was judged, suffered, died, and rose again in our place. In our place. And when he did all that, Jesus restored to us the choice. This is the incredible part. He didn't take our free will away.
He did all of that so that we could have the choice once again to love Him or reject Him. He still doesn't force us to love Him because love requires free will. The question I want to ask you, after being reminded of all that Jesus has done for you, how Jesus responded to the mess we made, the question I want to ask you is do you believe that God is good? Do you believe that God is good? The answer is yes.
It has to be. Because if God had abandoned us, we would only be experiencing what we deserve and the eternity that we had earned by rejecting Him. God owed us nothing. Do you understand that? God owed us nothing.
Yet he gave us the most precious thing in existence. He gave himself the life Jesus lived. And the death he died means that there is nothing you will ever experience, no amount of pain or suffering that will be worse than what Jesus has personally experienced in a human body.
He knows what it is to suffer, and he's compassionate toward us, even though he had every right to just leave us in the mess we had made. He didn't. And he will never ask us to go through more than He Himself has gone through. And it doesn't stop there. If you've been through the Book of Revelation with us, then you know God has a plan for Jesus to return to the Earth one day and reign as king.
And when that day comes, Jesus will reset the Earth back to an Eden-like state, and he will rule over the Earth for a thousand years. And the whole point of that will be to silence any voice who would cry out, God is not good. We were set up to fail because we will all bear witness to what the Earth was like when God first gave it over to man. And nobody will be able to say, wow, if I had come from a different family, if I had had better parents, if society hadn't set me up to fail. Because we will see how perfect and beautiful it was when it was given to us.
And despite that, we used our free will to still reject God. I have no doubts that only then, when the earth is restored by Jesus, will we actually realize how much we lost when Adam and Eve and you and I rejected God in favor of ourselves. Jesus has the right to do all this because, through the Cross and the Resurrection, He paid for our sins. Then he conquered the power of sin and death. And when he did that, he took back the title deed to the earth.
And when he does, when he lays claim to the earth, all those who have not chosen Him will be expelled from the earth. That's what's going to happen. So, if it's true that Jesus has the title deed to the earth, why doesn't he just do it right now? Well, because of what I just said. He's being patient.
The Bible says he wants to give people more time to use their free will to choose a relationship with Him so that they can be connected with Him in relationship and go into eternity, connected to the source of life and peace and love and everything good and be with Him. But make no mistake, the future is set. Jesus has already won. Satan is not inching closer to victory with time. Jesus is simply giving people on the Earth more time to be part of his family.
We know that free will must exist for love to exist. So, God's interventions in our world must not mess with free will in the broad sense. But I don't want to pretend we can understand why God sometimes intervenes and sometimes doesn't. When we struggle with that in our own lives, when we struggle with, well, why did he do something for that person? Why hasn't he done anything about my pain and suffering?
We have to go back to two truths. First, truth he did do something. He did do something for your pain and suffering. He died so that your pain and suffering would be a temporary situation and not your permanent state. He died so that the pain and suffering you experience in this life will be as bad as it ever gets.
Do you understand that? That if you belong to Jesus, this life is as bad as it will ever get for you? That's it. If you don't belong to Jesus, this is as good as it will ever be for you. But in eternity, for those who belong to Jesus, all of our suffering and pain will be forgotten.
And it will disappear from view like an old home in the rearview mirror of a car as you drive away to a new destination.
Never forget that Jesus has done something about your pain and suffering. And one of the reasons we need to be in God's word need to fellowship with Him in prayer daily, worship Him, gather as the Church, fellowship with brothers and sisters in the faith is so that we never allow ourselves to believe the lie that God has not been active on our behalf. He died and rose again on our behalf. The second thing we need to remember is that God is good. God is good.
If he is God, his view must be bigger and better than ours. His thoughts must be higher than ours. His plan and perspective must be greater than our understanding. Otherwise, he would not be God. When I look at the world around me, and then I look at the cross, I can only conclude that I haven't seen it all.
But I've seen enough to know that God is good. And I've seen it a thousand times over. He's good. Why is there pain and suffering in the world?
He's also doing something bigger than we can imagine. And what is truly best for us, individually and collectively, will only be truly understood when we arrive in his presence. And where there are gaps in our understanding, we choose to look at the cross and confess, I haven't seen it all, but I've seen enough to know that my God is good. And so if you're struggling with pain, if you are suffering, I want to encourage you to especially bring that to the Lord today as we worship in just a couple of minutes and realize that all the pain and suffering we experience is only because we invited sin into our world. But instead of leaving us in that place, god interrupted our hopelessness, suffered in our place, died in our place, and rose again in our place.
And he secured for those who choose to love Him a future free of pain and suffering, filled with better things than Eden ever saw. And I hope you'll take a moment to just thank the Lord for his goodness. If you've forgotten that if you've forgotten that the Lord is good, let Him know that you're sorry for being slow to remember, because he's only ever good. I'll ask the worship team to come up. In John chapter 14, Jesus said to his disciples, don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I'm going to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself so that where I am, you may be also. You know the way to where I'm going.
And then Jesus said this - I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever. He is the spirit of truth. The world is unable to receive Him because it doesn't see Him or know Him. But you do know Him because he remains with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans.
I am coming to you. In a little while, the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live too. And on that day, you will know that I am in my Father, you are in me and I am in you. Because Jesus lives, we live, too.
Because Jesus reigns in eternity, we will too. In the biggest, deepest, most hopeless mess we could ever make, Jesus showed up and said, put it on me. Put it all on me. And then he paid for it with his life.
Birthplace of who? Jesus? Nazareth
Christianity was started about 2-3000 years ago. ........jenny
And so where we can't understand the why right now, we fill in those gaps in our knowledge with what we do know, that he's good. He's good only ever and always. Let's pray. Would you bow your head and close your eyes, Father, we want to pray right now for any of our brothers and sisters who are here, who are going through pain or suffering. Lord, we love them, and we know that you love them infinitely more.
We pray, first of all, that they would be comforted by your spirit. That however deeply entrenched the pain is, even if it's turned into bitterness and anger, that you would break through it right now in the name of Jews, as the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the counselor, and that they would be overwhelmed by your kindness, by your mercy and our grace, by what you did for them and by the way you are with them right now. And so, we pray, Lord, that you would touch them right now in a way that is real, that is tangible, that fills up the parts of their soul that they didn't even realize were empty. With your spirit and with your peace. Jesus.
I pray for anyone carrying burdens as well. That you will enable us by your spirit to cast them at your feet, to let them go and to be filled with what your word says is the peace that goes beyond understanding. A peace that is in no way connected to our circumstances, that comes from above, that is divine, that is transcendent.
And Lord Jesus, above all else, we want to say thank you. Thank you. For not leaving us in the mess that we made. You owed us nothing. We had no rights to claim anything from you, no rights to accuse you of anything.
And had you chosen to walk away and leave us to our fate, who could call that unjust? No one. But, Lord, we are so thankful that because love is who you are, you could not simply walk away. It's not who you are. And so, you came and you interrupted our mess at the highest cost possible and loved us with our body and Your blood.
And we love you for that. And we are so thankful for that. And so, Jesus, we want to use the choice that you have restored to us to serve you, to love you, to worship you, to obey you, to offer our lives to you. And so, Jesus, we pray that you would reign as Lord over us. And whatever that looks like in our lives right now, we invite you to do it.
Whatever you want to do in us, we invite you to do it. Because we belong to you. And we are so glad we do. We love you Jesus. And we can't wait for the day when all things are made right, because the thing we want more than anything else is not bad stuff to end.
But we can't wait for the day when the universe is rightly reoriented around you, and when all fame and all glory returns to its rightful terminus at your feet. And then everything is in balance. And then everything is shalom with you at the center, you on the throne. We long for that day. And we pray until it comes that it would be as much like that as possible in our lives, individually, in our marriages, in our families, and in our church.
Jesus, we love you. We bless you. May you be honored above all things. It's in Your name we pray. Amen.
The cruxifiction must have been very painfull for a start.
Jesus went through every illness known to man.
From a toothache, to the worst pain anyony has known.
He felt it, He has known it personally.
No only phycial pain but als mental pains and suffering of loss of a child or loved one Jesus identified wish all of what mankind has known about suffering
Isaiah 53, tells us the the face of Jesus was noice to look at the time when he was on the cross.
When a soldier pierced him with his sword blood and water came out of the wond,
This meant that Jesus heart was broken....
King James Version
Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.
9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
Prior to Jesus dying on the cross, how were people saved?
Since Adam rebelled at the beginning, the Creator instituted only one way for a person to be declared righteous and that is through repentant trust in the coming Victor. The Lord promised his Victor would be the seed of a woman when he cursed the serpent (Genesis 3:14-15).
Scripture names the serpent the Devil and Satan, both words meaning Accuser and Slanderer. Our Lord calls him the liar and murderer from the beginning (John 8:44; Revelation 12:9). This first gospel-promise (or protoevangelium) provides the only antidote to the Slanderer’s lie. The Coming One even calls himself the Truth in contrast to Satan’s lie (John 14:6, 8:32). Implicitly, the first couple had to put their repentant trust in him alone as the coming seed of the woman when they allowed the Lord to clothe their shame with slain animal skins. These skins were a symbol of the coming sacrificial and substitutionary ransom for their sin, the innocent One for the guilty. The coming Victor would not only crush the Serpent’s head to deliver Adam and Eve from their fear of divine wrath but also would be the slain Lamb to cover their shame and guilt with his ransoming, outpoured blood.
John the Baptist explicitly named Jesus, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). This Lamb was also the Lion-King of the tribe of Judah, the Messiah or Christ (Revelation 5:5), the Son of David and the Seed of Abraham (Mathew 1:1; Galatians 3:16).
Anyone, who trusted in the promise of the coming Son, now “born of a woman, born under law,” was justified, delivered from both the curse and obligation of the broken divine law. Jesus has now come to fulfill the complete and loving righteousness demanded by the holy Creator-God (Galatians 3:13-14, 4:1-7) so that a great exchange took place from the beginning. We see this most clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him.” True justifying trust has always worked its way out into a new lifestyle of giving love (Habakkuk 2:4; Galatians 5:6; James 2:14-26; 1 John 3:11-16).
All the saved and holy people of the Old Testament fully trusted God, as Hebrews 11 teaches. God revealed the Gospel to, for example, Abraham with the promise that all peoples of earth would be blessed through following his example of trusting God’s promise and being justified by repentant faith. Everyone who followed his steps of faith is saved as Paul also shows in Romans 4:9-17. God then put a perfect righteousness into his account book (Galatians 3:5-9; Hebrews 11:8-12) as he does ours (Romans 5:18-25). Moses also “regarded disgrace for the sake of [the coming] Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward” (Hebrews 11:26).
Overall, the only way anyone has been declared righteous from the Fall until the present is through trust in the substitutionary atonement of our Victor-King. In the past, people looked forward to him; now we look back to his finished work.
The Ark of the Covenant
In the early years of the Israelite kingdom, the Ark of the Covenant was periodically moved about among several sanctuaries, especially those of Shechem and Shiloh. After King David’s capture of Jerusalem, however, the Ark was moved to that city. This action joined Israel’s major religious object with the monarchy and the city itself into a central symbol of union of the Israelite tribes. As the site for a future temple, David chose Mount Moriah, or the Temple Mount, where it was believed Abraham had built the altar on which to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Where Is the Ark of the Covenant?
The First Temple was constructed during the reign of David’s son, Solomon, and completed in 957 BC. Other sanctuaries retained their religious functions, however, until Josiah (reigned c. 640–609 BCE) abolished them and established the Temple of Jerusalem as the only place of sacrifice in the Kingdom of Judah.
The First Temple was built as an abode for the Ark and as a place of assembly for the entire people. The building itself, therefore, was not large, but the courtyard was extensive. The Temple building faced eastward. It was oblong and consisted of three rooms of equal width: the porch, or vestibule (?ulam); the main room of religious service, or Holy Place (hekhal); and the Holy of Holies (devir), the sacred room in which the Ark rested. A storehouse (ya?i?a) surrounded the Temple except on its front (east) side.
The First Temple contained five altars: one at the entrance of the Holy of Holies, two others within the building, a large bronze one before the porch, and a large tiered altar in the courtyard. A huge bronze bowl, or “sea,” in the courtyard was used for the priests’ ablutions. Within the Holy of Holies, two cherubim of olive wood stood with the Ark; this innermost sanctuary was considered the dwelling place of the Divine Presence (Shekhina) and could be entered only by the high priest and only on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).
The Temple suffered at the hands of Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylonia, who removed the Temple treasures in 604 BC and 597 BC and totally destroyed the building in 587/586. This destruction and the deportations of Jews to Babylonia in 586 and 582 were seen as fulfillments of prophecy and, therefore, strengthened Judaic religious beliefs and awakened the hope for the reestablishment of the independent Jewish state.
Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenian dynasty of Persia and conqueror of Babylonia, in 538 BC issued an order allowing exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Work was completed in 515 BC. There is no known detailed plan of the Second Temple, which was constructed as a modest version of the original building. It was surrounded by two courtyards with chambers, gates, and a public square. It did not include the ritual objects of the First Temple; of special significance was the loss of the Ark itself. Ritual, however, was elaborate and was conducted by well-organized families of priests and Levites.
During the Persian and Hellenistic (4th–3rd century BC) periods, the Temple generally was respected, and in part subsidized, by Judaea’s foreign rulers. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, however, plundered it in 169 BC and desecrated it in 167 BC by commanding that sacrifices be made to Zeus on an altar built for him. This final act touched off the Hasmonean revolt, during which Judas Maccabeus cleansed and rededicated the Temple; the event is celebrated in the annual festival of Hanukkah.
Construction began in 20 BCE and lasted for 46 years. The area of the Temple Mount was doubled and surrounded by a retaining wall with gates. The Temple was raised, enlarged, and faced with white stone. The new Temple square served as a gathering place, and its porticoes sheltered merchants and money changers. A stone fence (soreg) and a rampart (?el) surrounded the consecrated area forbidden to Gentiles.
The Temple proper began, on the east, with the Court of Women, each side of which had a gate and each corner of which had a chamber. This court was named for a surrounding balcony on which women observed the annual celebration of Sukkoth. The western gate of the court, approached by a semicircular staircase, led to the Court of the Israelites, that portion of the Court of Priests open to all male Jews. Surrounding the inner sanctuary, the Court of Priests contained the sacrificial altar and a copper laver for priestly ablutions. This court was itself surrounded by a wall broken with gates and chambers. The Temple sanctuary building was wider in front than in the rear; its eastern facade had two pillars on either side of the gate to the entrance hall. Within the hall, a great gate led to the sanctuary, at the western end of which was the Holy of Holies.
The Herodian Temple was again the centre of Israelite life. It was not only the focus of religious ritual but also the repository of the Holy Scriptures and other national literature and the meeting place of the Sanhedrin, the highest court of Jewish law during the Roman period. The rebellion against Rome that began in 66 CE soon focused on the Temple and effectively ended with the Temple’s destruction on the 9th/10th of Av, 70 CE.
All that remained of the retaining wall surrounding the Temple Mount was a portion of the Western Wall (also called the Wailing Wall), which continues to be the focus of Jewish aspirations and pilgrimage. Made part of the wall surrounding the Muslim Dome of the Rock and Al-Aq?a Mosque in 691 CE, it returned to Jewish control in 1967.
What time of year is Yom Kippur observed?
Yom Kippur, most solemn of Jewish religious holidays, observed on the 10th day of the lunar month of Tishri (in the course of September and October), when Jews seek to expiate their sins and achieve reconciliation with God. Yom Kippur concludes the “10 days of repentance” that begin with Rosh Hashana (New Year’s Day) on the first day of Tishri. The Bible refers to Yom Kippur as Shabbat Shabbaton (“Sabbath of Solemn Rest,” or “Sabbath of Sabbaths”) because, even though the holy day may fall on a weekday, it is on Yom Kippur that solemnity and cessation of work are most complete. The purpose of Yom Kippur is to effect individual and collective purification by the practice of forgiveness of the sins of others and by sincere repentance for one’s own sins against God.
Passage: Revelation 19:1-10...Speaker: Jeff Thompson
Heaven rejoices over the destruction of Babylon and prepares for the Second Coming, including the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Well, it is March 2022 when I'm recording this video. And despite all the crazy things going on in the world right now in the area of frivolity, there is a fascinating debate unfolding. The question at hand is, are there more wheels or doors in the world? The question, of course, is ridiculous, perhaps even as ridiculous as the rumor that the book of Revelation is hard to understand. But fatuity say we for you see, the word revelation means something has been revealed.
And the first words of this book tell us exactly who it is that's being revealed. It's the revelation of Jesus Christ. God wanted us to read this book so much that he promised anyone who would take the time to read and respond to it a special blessing. And we find that in Revelation, chapter one, verse three, let's claim it together, as we always do at the beginnings of our studies. It says, Blessed is he or she who reads.
And those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it for the time is near, but God knew they would still be those who would say, It's just too hard to understand. So to make it simple to understand, he also included an easy to follow outline. And we find that in Revelation, chapter one, verse 19, Jesus tells John, First, I want you to write the things which you have seen. That was the resurrected and glorified Jesus in chapter one. Secondly, Jesus says, John, I want you to write about the things which are that refers to the Church age which began around 32 ad on Pentecost, continues to the present day and is prophesied in chronological order in chapters two and three.
And then third, and lastly, Jesus tells John to write about the things which will take place after this future events that will unfold after the Church age comes to an end. Now, where does the Church age end? That takes place in Revelation, chapter four, verse one. Let me read it to you. After these things, John says, I looked and behold a door standing open in heaven.
And the first voice which I heard, that was the voice of Jesus in chapter one, was like a trumpet speaking with me, saying, Come up here and I will show you things which must take place after this. And up John goes, serving as a picture of the Church who will be raptured to be with the Lord. And Jesus takes all of chapters four and five to make sure we don't miss the fact that the Church is with Him in heaven before he begins pouring out his wrath on the Earth that has rejected Him. And as that wrath is being poured out, Revelation 616 reveals that those on the Earth will know and understand the source of their judgment, identifying it as the wrath of the Lamb. Who is the Lamb?
In Scripture, it's Jesus. So chapter one, introduces the focus of Revelation, Jesus Christ, chapters two and three take us through the Church age up to the present day. Then the Church goes up. In chapter four, verses one, we see her safe and secure in heaven for all of chapters four and five before wrath is poured out on the Earth, beginning in chapter six. That wrath continues for a period of seven years known as the Tribulation, and is documented in chapter six through 19, at which point Jesus returns to the Earth with his Saints in the event known as the Second Coming.
The surviving Jewish population of Israel is hiding in Petra and the our creation itself groans and longs for has arrived the return of the King, also known as the Second Coming. To help us keep the big picture in mind over our next few studies, I put this on your outline. I want to point out five things that will take place at the Second Coming. Firstly, Jesus will defeat all forces of evil, freeing the Earth of Satan's influence. Secondly, Jesus will reveal himself to Israel and their relationship will be restored.
Thirdly, Jesus will remove everyone on the Earth who has rejected him. Fourthly, Jesus will host the marriage supper of the Lamb, where he will be joined to his bride, the Church. And then Fifthly, Jesus will inaugurate. He will initiate the millennial Kingdom and begin his reign over the Earth from Jerusalem. And we'll discuss each of these developments in greater detail as we journey through the text of Revelation chapters 19 and 20 over these next few studies.
Let's start doing that right now. In Revelation, chapter 19, verses one, it says, after these things, after the destruction of literal and mystical Babylon, John says, I heard a loud voice of a great multitude in heaven saying, Alleluia Salvation and glory and honor and power belong to the Lord our God. For true and righteous are his judgments, because he has judged the great Harlot who corrupted the Earth with her fornication and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants shed by her. We saw that unfold in chapter 17 and 18. And here we see heaven rejoicing again at the demise of Babylon.
This great multitude of voices likely belongs to the Angels as it appears, the Church responds in verses four and is called to rejoice in verse. In verses three, again they said, Hallelujah, her smoke rises up forever and ever. That phrase just means her judgment. Babylon's judgment is final and it's irreversible. Verses four and the 24 elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who sat on the throne saying Amen, Hallelujah.
You may recall from our study of chapters four and five that the 24 elders represent the Royal priesthood of believers, consisting of Old Testament Saints and the Church. The word Amen means so be it.
The word Hallelujah or Alleluia is a compound word. Halal is the Hebrew word for praise, and yah is one of the Hebrew names or terms for God.
So when you put them together as halalyah or Hallelujah, it simply means Praise God or praise the Lord.
So where I don't understand yet, I choose to simply say Amen, Hallelujah, because I know that sooner or later I'll end up saying that anyway, so I might as well say it right now. In faith, mature believers recognize the pattern of God's goodness and faithfulness in their lives when they doubt God and are proven wrong by his faithfulness. Mature believers actually take note. The immature believer never recognizes the pattern. It doesn't matter how many times they doubt God and are proven wrong by their faithfulness.
Immature believers never learn, never recognize that God is faithful. So in honesty, which description fits you? Are you confident in the character of your heavenly Father? You can be because he loves you more than you could possibly imagine. He's faithful, he's faithful.
He is faithful, and he deserves your trust. Would you make a note of this? Mature believers know God's character and are therefore able to say Amen and Hallelujah in faith. In every circumstance of life. I'll say it again, mature believers know God's character and are therefore able to say Amen.
So be it, and Alleluia praise God in faith in every circumstance of life. This chapter can be a bit awkward for some people because clearly we believers who are in heaven are glad that all this is happening. And this causes some to ask, how can a loving God and the Kingdom and the people of a loving God be happy about wrath being poured out on people like this? I don't want to shock you with horror stories in this message, but I will say this. You should get yourself a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs and spend an evening reading about what those who have hated Jesus across the centuries have done to believers simply because they love Jesus.
I hope that you all have some idea of the atrocities that ISIS and their counterparts committed against Christians in the Middle East within the past decade and what's going on in places like Nigeria, China, and North Korea today. The Book of Revelation speaks of a coming time when God will say, Enough, my family is all accounted for. The only ones left are those who will never receive me. So all that justice we've been putting off, all that justice that has been delayed because of my mercy need no longer be delayed. And all of heaven, including you and me, won't say, oh, that's so unfair, or just wait longer.
Verses Seven Let us be glad and rejoice and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. In other words, the Church is ready to step into her destiny as the Bride of Christ. Verse eight and to her the Church it was granted. Would you underline that word? Granted, because it means it was given, it wasn't earned, and to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright.
For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the Saints. What are you wear to the greatest party the universe has ever seen? Scripture tells us that the only thing to be seen in will be righteousness. We will be robed in righteousness by Jesus. Isaiah 61 Ten it's on your outline declares, I will greatly rejoice in the Lord.
My soul shall be joyful in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of Salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness. Jesus gives us his righteousness to wear in the presence of His Father, making us beautiful and freeing us from every trace of guilt and shame. And that is our reality right now. We are robed in the righteousness of Christ right now.
We look like Jesus to our Heavenly Father right now. But it'll get even better because when we are translated, when we receive our new resurrected bodies, those bodies will be sinless. We will actually be able to be righteous actively. What I'm saying is that our righteous works won't be like filthy rags, as Isaiah called them forever. Are the Angels righteous?
Absolutely. Are the Angels righteous only because of Jesus? No, they're not robed in the righteousness of Jesus. They are righteous because they were created without sin and have remained faithful to the Lord. When we are translated into our resurrected bodies, we will be recreated without sin and be able to faithfully serve the Lord in righteousness.
We won't need imputed righteousness forever. The Lord's plan is to clothe us in intrinsic righteousness for all eternity. I know this can sound scandalous, but it's true. It's what the Bible teaches. And as I've shared before God's, scandalously.
Good plans for us are summed up in one John three, two, where our brother John writes, Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not yet been revealed. What we shall be future tense. But we know, we know this about our future, that when he is revealed, when Jesus is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as he is. However good you think God's plans for you are, I promise they're even better verse is then he. The angel who was still with John from chapter 18 said to me, Right, blessed are those who are called.
The literal term is invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, These are the true sayings of God. Here we have the famous marriage supper of the lamb. And when the angel says, These are the true sayings of God, he's simply saying, you can bet your life on this, it's going to happen. The Bible describes the relationship between Jesus and his Church as the relationship between a groom and his chaste pure bride.
We're talking about Saints like Abraham, David, the prophets, etc. And their spirits have been with the Lord in heaven since the death and resurrection of Jesus. However, they have not yet received resurrected bodies. As best we can tell from the scriptures, it appears old Covenant Saints will receive their new bodies at the second coming, that they might participate in the wedding. And the millennial Kingdom.
The next group that will be invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb is Tribulation Saints, those who place their faith in Jesus after the Rapture and either died in the Tribulation, were martyred in the Tribulation, or were alive on the Earth at the end when Jesus returns at the Second Coming. Tribulation Saints will also be at this wedding. And then the third and final group that will be at this wedding is Redeemed Israel, 144,000 and all ethnic Jews who will turn to Jesus after the Rapture, including those who repent when he appears to them at the Second Coming. And by the way, when he does that, all Israel will repent who are still alive on the Earth at that point. There are some amazing parallels between a traditional Jewish wedding and the destiny of the Church as the bride of Christ.
It's a little bit difficult to verify all this information if I'm going to be honest because if you go to contemporary Jewish sources, there are traditions that have come in that had nothing to do with what was taking place two and a half thousand years ago. And it's really hard to nail down all the details on this. So, if you're aware that I'm off on something here, it's not my intent to do so just shoot me an email and let me know. But no matter what the big picture and the big ideas stand here, and I can vouch for those we've talked about this before, but it's worth walking through again. In a traditional Jewish wedding, the father and son would identify the location where they believed the perfect bride resided.
It could be their own small village, it could be a few villages up the road, or it could even be further away. The bride would be chosen by an intermediary on the behalf of the groom. It could be his father, it could be a servant, it could be a relative, et cetera. Assuming the woman was agreeable to marrying the man, the intermediary and her father would negotiate a marriage contract, which would include a purchase price, what some cultures call the dowry. That price would be established based on three factors.
First, the father's wealth. If the father of the groom were a rich man, he would pay a high price so as to not appear cheap. Second, the bride's worth. If she were beautiful or otherwise gifted, her price would be higher. Thirdly, the grooms work.
In some cases, it was up to the groom to pay the price. If the father was not around. If the woman was willing and the price was satisfactory, the couple would become engaged betrothed. Even though they were not yet married, they were joined together in a legal binding agreement. At that point, the bride would be considered set apart, which is literally what the word sanctified means.