Supernatural Intervention

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing God's active hand in the universe. Uh one of the terms for that is providence, something that we talked a little bit about in the Thanksgiving episode that we did last fall called God's Gifts Man's Duties. And in that episode we were mostly focused on after God gives you gifts, what do you do with them? This episode is going to be focused entirely on the activity of the supernatural in our lives, both God and evil. And the reason for doing this is that as we've said before, there's I think a very strong case to be made that the vast majority of people in church pews are somewhere between functional deists

1:25 and functional Gnostics. And some they manage to combine both of those. And so today we want to make the case from scripture that it's important for us as Christians to realize when and how God is active, and when and how Satan is active, when and how there's evil, actual supernatural evil acting in the world in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Because when we separate one from the other, when we when we pretend that, well, this is just random happenstance. When we take God out of the equation, that's the watchmaker theory. That's deism. That's saying, well, God doesn't really do anything. He's just kind of up there. You know, he's trapped in heaven. And he gave it this book. And so we read the book on Sunday and try to, you

2:08 know, follow the rules. But otherwise, God's not doing anything. And that's really how most Christians actually view the world. Even the ones who will pay lip service to say, no, God's doing stuff when push comes to shove and you say, Well, did God do this? Like, who could say? And so we're going to give a number of examples today from scripture where Christians who are given to us as examples don't behave the way we do today. They set an example that we, by and large refuse to follow. And it's not simply that we're not copying their pattern of behavior. We don't believe the way they believe. We don't believe that God is active and that Satan is prowling like a roaring lion. And because we don't believe those things, it affects the way we

2:52 act. It affects the way we work with others, the way we communicate with others. And crucially, it affects how we confess the Christian faith in the very moments where God is making Himself known through both good and evil events. So that's we're gonna lay out today. Fifteen seconds of housekeeping. Corey got a shipment of the challenge coins out last week on Saturday. So some of you are already receiving those. He thinks he'll probably be able to get the rest of them out by the end of the week. So hopefully by the time you hear this recording next week or next week's recording, everyone who had pre-ordered or had ordered subsequently will have received their Stone Choir Challenge coins. Thank you to everyone for your support there.

3:31 And we'll probably be talking a little bit about how that plays into Providence because that's part of it. When we receive these gifts from you for something that we've done. In a sense, that is truly God's providence in our lives. And that's the way I see it. One of the first things that Christians typically teach their children is to say grace before meals. You pray at bedtime and you pray before you eat. And if you as a parent aren't doing that or haven't doing that, please start. It's an important thing. It doesn't need to be a long, elaborate prayer. It can be as simple as I often just say, Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let thy gifts to us be blessed. Amen. Takes eight seconds. Should do more maybe, but I always try to pause and to

4:13 remember that whatever I'm about to eat came from God and that is the essence of the Christian life is to know the good things that we receive didn't just come out of nowhere. Food doesn't just come from the grocery store. It's an example we've given before. Gifts from others don't just fall from the grocery. And it's not just one person being kind to another person or helping another person. Those are good works that God has prepared beforehand for us to do for each other. And so when the time comes and those good things happen, if we're recipients of them, we need to remember where they came from. And to fail to do that is to fail to acknowledge that God is active in our lives, both when we act and when

4:57 we receive the acts of others, for good or for ill. And so some of the examples we'll give are when bad things happen. You know, this is the crux theologorum. It's the question that has long challenged theologians. I don't think it's really that difficult. You just have to keep your head on straight. Where does evil come from? How is it the good men are the subject of evil things? And there's an entire book in the book of Job that we'll talk about today that that goes into that. It's that's what the whole book is about. And what's interesting there is we'll get into the the text. This whole episode could just be about Job and we can make the point we're not going to belabor that. And we're not going to end with the Job 38 through 41

5:37 reading that we so often commend, but I am going to read parts from chapters one and two because it lays out very clearly that God, at least in that one particular circumstance, was active in the world. God was interacting with Satan. Satan was active in the world. And while that is a specific example that's recorded in scripture for us of events that happened, of conversations that occurred. It's also an example of the principle here. And I think that one of the dangers that we have when we treat what's in scripture as Bible stories is that it becomes the story of Job or the story of Noah, where it's the self-contained thing where it's an old dead guy who did something and God talked to him face to face and so somehow he is

6:22 gonna have a different experience than we would have when it comes to our own faith. And that's true to an extent, but the gift that they had of interacting with God face to face, in some ways, is fundamentally different than. And I think in some ways it's arguably almost lesser than the way that we interact with God, where we receive scripture. God laid everything out in writing. You know, it's over a thousand pages. You can sit down, you can read in in a couple weeks if you put your mind to it. And it And it's God laying down everything that he ever wanted to communicate to all of mankind. The conversations that he had with Noah and with Abraham and with those other men, absolutely a blessing.

7:05 They were blessed in ways that we have not been to speak with God face to face and to know things that He said to them that were not recorded for our benefit. That was for them. And so they're certainly superior in that sense. But we have the superior advantage, particularly after Christ's birth, death, and resurrection, is that all of those promises, all those gifts, all those prophecies for us are in the rearview mirror. And so we've received scripture just it lands in our laps, especially if you're raised a Christian, if parents are Christians and then they raise Christian children. This is just given to you as an inheritance. In a way, that's much richer than what those men had to go through.

7:46 We call them the patriarchs, justifiably so. But they kind of had to do it the hard way compared to us in terms of receiving all the bounty of God. And so when He gives us these things like, you know, the story of Job and these other examples where men specifically interacted with God and they were blessed and they also went through tremendous travails. You know, most of those stories are about loss and suffering and And hardship and chastisement. And that's another element to this. There are things that God does and that God permits to happen that are evil. And we'll talk about what that means because we're not saying that God is evil or that God does evil things, but the scripture very clearly says that God permits evil to occur and he will

8:32 actually have a hand in it. And Job says that straight out, and then God says that he didn't sin by saying that. So it's it's a very tricky thing to understand because you have to be careful not to turn to a heretic where suddenly God is doing bad things and it's like, oh, whatever, he's God, so I guess he can do bad things. When God does it, it isn't bad. But that's not the same as saying that God is capricious. It's talking about his nature. It's not talking about him having license. It's two different things. For us to look at the way God acts in those Bible stories is a template for us understanding how he acts in our lives because it's ongoing. And I think one of the particular challenges that we have in the

9:14 church age, you know, after Pentecost, is it it's clear from both scripture and from church history that basically after the last of the apostles died, it seems like by and large miracles stopped occurring routinely. Miracles have certainly still occurred. We're not cessationists. We're not saying all miraculous activity stopped. In fact, part of this episode is a point that that's not the case at all. However, when you look at what was going on in the first century of the church, you have the apostles in particular running around raising the dead, healing the lame. They were doing the same miracles that Jesus did. And then those miracles themselves don't happen. They're people aren't being raised from the dead later on.

10:00 I think the important thing when we're looking at those is to recognize that as the gospel was spreading in the very earliest days of the church, people didn't have the benefit of scripture, not certainly of the New Testament. And even the Septuagint, which they had the correlation, the teaching that the apostles were giving to the church and to unbelievers being brought into the church was, hey, all these prophecies in the Septuagint have been fulfilled in Christ. They're being fulfilled in us giving you this good word today. And the miracles were there as proof that the promises of Scripture were also true, just as in Jesus' day. He wasn't there to heal all of the lame or to raise all of the dead.

10:41 Those specific miracles were performed to say, I can do this, I can also forgive sins. I can do all the things that are promised of me in scripture. And the miracle was the physical performance of his power, of God's power. And so when the apostles continued that in the first century, it was the same thing. It was a physical performance of miraculous power that could only possibly be supernatural. And then the question is, is it supernaturally good or supernaturally evil? This is one of the admonitions is given in the New Testament. Paul specifically says, test the spirits. It said that there will be false prophets who will you know the the passage we frequently quote where those false prophets cry out,

11:23 Lord, Lord, do we not prophesy and cast out demons in your name? And Jesus said, I never knew you. They were performing miracles. Evil wicked men, in some cases, are able to do things that seem miraculous. There's supernatural activity that is demonic. And when we refuse to acknowledge that there's an aspect of this, certainly a lesser aspect than God's activity, but nevertheless real, there are times and places where evil will do things, and it's not always apparently bad. I gave the example recently in another interview I did with someone else that I watched a documentary about mushrooms about psilocybin, you know, psychedelics. And there was a man who's apparently f very famous in that community.

12:05 Terrible name for it. It's not a community. It's a they're lost. But he was up a tree in a storm, tripping his mind out on psilocybin, and he communicated with an entity. And he had a horrible stuttering problem and he asked the entity up this tree in this thunderstorm to cure his stuttering and it did his he he he was a lifelong stutter and went away, never happened again. And he attributed that to being on a silocybin trip and saying, What a wonderful thing, what great blessings we can all have if we go down that rabbit hole. There's something down there that's gonna fulfill our wishes. And it didn't hurt him. It fixed something. It fixed a malady similarly to the sort of miracle that Jesus

12:50 performed, where he healed people who had, you know, problems that were similarly medical in nature, psychological in nature, but inexorable. And then when they're miraculously healed and someone's life improves. When Jesus did, it was proof of his power. When that guy was up a tree in a thunderstorm and the psilocybin entity, it was a demon, said, What do you want? And he said, I want to stutter. And he said, Okay, you're not going to stutter anymore. And it went away. That was a performance of a miracle. That was absolutely a miracle. That was supernatural. And it was wicked, even though the outcome itself was good. And so these things occasionally happen. And God willing, you'll never see anything wicked like that, because it's

13:31 particularly troublesome for those who deny that there's any supernatural. And because we don't see us anymore, you know, after the first century, there are occasional miracles that I do believe were sincerely miracles. And certainly in our own lives, there are individual cases where people are miraculously healed. That happens fairly frequently. It's not the sort of big ticket thing that you don't hear a voice, there's no flash of light, it's just there's the intense prayer of the faithful, and then something that seemed medically impossible is granted and someone is spared what seemed like was going to be a terrible outcome. That is no less miraculous. And historically, Christians have always viewed things that way.

14:12 And so one of the challenges that we have to get over today as Christians in the 21st century is not thinking that scientific knowledge of things gives us an excuse to say that God didn't do it. I think that's one of the key lessons from this whole episode today. The fact that we have an explanation, some natural explanation for how something came about, doesn't mean that there was no supernatural element. So we'll give some examples throughout this episode today, but It's part of the reason that I still am not shaded of saying that I love science. That's a completely cursed comment today. Used to say someone loves science. I love it, not because it's an abandonment of God in my heart, but because when I see discoveries made by intelligent men who

14:57 are generally atheists, I see them revealing God's creation in amazing new ways. I see them revealing God exactly as he wants us to find him, in creation as well as in scripture. I don't mean to set those against each other. But when I see a scientific discovery, whether it's you know molecular biology or astronomy, whatever it is, some amazing new learning about the world. Like, thank God, what a miracle. We have a natural explanation for something that's just staggeringly beautiful. It's inconceivable the things that actually happen. And so the I Love Science guys who are all atheists, they're able to just merrily trot down that path because they feel the sense of ebulliance and and discovery and it's so much fun to

15:44 be seeing these beautiful things, but they don't understand why it's beautiful. They see it as beauty for its own sake, whereas scripture makes very clear that that beauty is revelatory of the creator who made them. And so Christians should celebrate those things too. We shouldn't be snarky about it. We shouldn't be dismissive. We shouldn't say there's no space, you know, it's only this planet because somehow that's in the Bible. That's anathetical to Christianity. All the things that these idiot pagans, these genius pagans, who are complete idiots, because they don't believe the Creator, they worship creatures, they worship themselves. But the things that they discover are true. When they discover things, you know, thirteen billion years away, that doesn't

16:29 mean that the creation story is not true. It's not just a story, it's what actually happened. We covered that in six thousand years in counting. The more we learn about creation itself, the more we see God's active hand in it. And that is how Christians should view these things. We're not set in opposition to the world as it's discovering more things. We're the only ones who can actually put them in context. Because the context is that God is creator of all things and his supernatural power is not only unlimited, but it's continuously active all over the place. And so to see that distilled down to one specific detail or scientific moment is itself wondrous. It should be a source for joy. If you don't care about that stuff, okay.

17:15 It's not everybody's cut out to care about science. But it's not inherently lame to think that those things are wondrous. What's foolish is to think that those aren't God's activities. Because when it comes down to when you look at scripture, all the things that are natural processes are themselves miraculous because God is driving them. And so I hope you'll take that away from this episode today is that to understand something better naturally is not to separate it from the Creator, but to link those two together inextricably, because creation testifies to the creator, and we see that around us every day. I think part of the problem when it comes to seeing God's active hand in creation is that we think of those miracles in the Old Testament or

18:02 in the New Testament. We think of someone being brought back to life or or mana falling from the sky or any of these other things that are very in your face as it were, very clearly miraculous and really undeniable for those who see them, unless you are just entirely impenitent and hard hearted. And so we miss just how many miracles are around us every single day. We could go all the way to saying that everything is a miracle, which is very well true, because of course creation itself and everything in it is an act of God, and God must continue to act to sustain it. It cannot exist apart from God because nothing exists apart from God in that sense of being apart from God. Separated from God certainly, but that is a different matter.

18:52 And so we ignore all the small miracles in our lives, and certainly our lives are dotted with small miracles. I think that when we get to paradise or the judgment, whatever it happens to be, if God permits it, we will look back on our lives and see a chain of events and circumstances that at the time here stuck in time we may very well have thought were random or chance occurrences, and yet will recognize that God did have a plan for us. Now we need to be careful when we go down that particular road because you can fall off both sides of the horse as is often the case. If you are a deist, you fall off the left side of the horse. But the right side of the horse, if you fall off, that would be saying that every little detail and everything that happens, every

19:47 occurrence, all of it, were exactly what God intended were part of his plan that is so detailed that every last thing that happens in your life is according to that plan. And the problems with that should be obvious, because of course that would attribute to God All of the actually evil and wicked things that happen in the world. Not evil in the sense of harmful or bad, because some of those do come from God. Certainly afflictions and things like that can be from God. The thorns that make it difficult to farm are from God, those are evil in that particular sense of evil. But there is another sense of evil, which is the sort of evil that is committed by other agents, other sentient beings. So the evil that is done by Satan is from Satan.

20:41 Now, God has a leash on Satan because the devil is God's devil. He can act only in so far as God permits. But the evil done by the devil, that is wickedness, is not attributable to God Himself. The same as if one human being were to murder another. God did not plan that murder. God did not cause that murder to take place. That is wickedness that lies in the heart of man, not in the heart of God. And so we cannot fall off the right hand side of the horse, and attribute absolutely everything to God. That would, of course, be to deny any sort of free will to man. We won't get into the depths of that issue today because it's certainly not the focus. But all of these things are not absolutely attributable to God univocally as it were.

21:37 So don't fall off either side of the horse. Don't become a deist, and don't become a fatalist, perhaps, or something even more than a fatalist in this case. But to turn to scripture and really providence proper, we should probably start in Genesis, which is appropriate it being the first book in Scripture. We won't start with the first chapter, but I'll do a reading from Genesis twenty two, which covers the idea of providence very well. After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am, he said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.

22:28 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac, and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey, I and the boy will go over there, and worship, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. they went both of them together, and Isaac said to his father Abraham, My father, And he said, Here I am, my son. He said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the

23:11 lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy, or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold behind him

23:56 was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, the Lord will provide, as it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. Here we have a very good example of a man who truly trusted that God would provide, which is really what providence is Providence is God providing. It is God's active working out in time of what he intends for his creatures. Because God does have a plan. Don't mistake what I said earlier for implying that God does not have a plan. He most certainly does, and we'll get into many verses that deal with that specifically. But God acts in time, in order to test, we see that

24:50 here with Abraham, and indeed also in order to bless, we see that also with the provision of the ram. Incidentally as a side matter, the angel of the Lord here is Christ, which you should think every time you read this passage. It's very obvious in this passage, some others it's not as clear if it's an angel or Christ himself. Here it's very obvious it is Christ. How do we know that? Well think back to what the angel of the Lord says, You have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And so that is Christ, who is God, because only God can say what is said there. So obviously we have an instance of not the Trinity here because we don't have the Spirit explicitly mentioned or really implicitly mentioned either

25:39 in this particular passage, but we do have God the Father and God the Son. And that's right here in Genesis, so the Trinity is found throughout Scripture. It is not simply something that was constructed by the Church later on as some would conclude, something to pay attention to when you read the Old Testament, particularly when you see the angel of the Lord. But to return to Providence, the core of what Providence is is God's action in time for the good of the elect. We're not going to get into election in this episode, at least not deeply, because we did an episode on that, and so And so you can go and listen to that. But it is important to remember when you think about how God acts in time, what God is doing in time with his actions,

26:31 is that all things work together for the good of those who have been called, of those who love God, and of course you can only love God if you have in fact been called. We love him because he first loved us. So that is what providence is. We used to recognize this as a society, and we don't really do that anymore. We used to have sayings and things like that that were just part of the social fabric, and we recognized That what happened to us in this life was very much up to God. We were in God's hands, and whether good or ill, all things were in his control. We have this a little bit even in our language today, although we don't recognize it. When you say goodbye, you're saying God be with you.

27:19 Now we've modified it somewhat, and so we've sort of taken God out of it. But it's a recognition that whether or not we will meet again and what happens to you when you leave is up to God. It's ultimately in his hands, because all things are in God's hands. Yes, there is wickedness and there is suffering and there is evil in the world that is caused by men and devils, because there is that supernatural evil, which is something we as Christians must never forget. But those things can happen only insofar as God permits them and only to the extent that God permits. Because God is absolutely in control. There is nothing that is beyond his control. It's not to say that God causes all of it, but he does permit it.

28:07 And so the things that happen to you in this life, you have to look to God as not the immediate cause of those, but as the one who is in control of them, the one who dictates how far they can go. And so when things go well you rejoice and you give thanks to God. When things go poorly you still rejoice and give thanks to God, because we know that all things will work together for the good of the elect, of those who are called, of those who have faith. These terms can all be used interchangeably essentially. Another phrase, of course, comes to mind, and it's one that I've used before in a number of places there but for the grace of God go I. That's a recognition of providence. That is a recognition of God's control.

28:59 It's also recognition, of course, of God's gifts, which really is also to an extent what providence is. But when we say something like that, we are placing ourselves in a proper mindset instead of believing that everything I have is a result of my hard work or my parents' hard work or my grandparents, those things are important to recognize, but ultimately we must give all credit to God. He does these things in time through means, as we mentioned many times before. God acts in time through means, and so many of the good things that you will receive will be by the hand of other men. Evil things as well sometimes, unfortunately, in a fallen world, but the good things you receive will often be by the hand of

29:46 other men, or some creature, some part of creation. Ultimately, those things still come from God. The ram that replaced Abraham's son was a creature. That was just a ram that was wandering around and got stuck in those bushes. Now, God, of course, ordained that to happen. It's unlikely that God just snapped and a ram came into being stuck in the thicket. God ordained orchestrated things such that that would happen at the right time. That Ram was a blessing, that was providential. That Ram replaced Abraham's son on the altar. That was God acting in time for the benefit of Abraham, for the benefit of a believer, because of course Abraham was a Christian. He was a believer. He had faith in the Messiah who was to come.

30:39 Incidentally, he got to speak with the Messiah who was to come in this particular instance, although he may not have realized that at the time. But as Christians we need to change our mindset from, as Wo said in his opening, the deistic mindset that is so common in our age, because we've reduced everything to scientific knowledge, in the very much lowercase s sense of science, not in the expanded proper sense, which is just knowledge or understanding, even. But science does not give us all truth, most certainly. And we should recognize this most definitely as Christians, because all of these good things, everything, flows from God. And so if we want to attribute everything to the material world,

31:33 to the universe, what we're saying is that the creatures are greater than the creator. And that's exactly backwards. Because there is nothing that the creatures have that did not come from the Creator. Because obviously the Creator created the creatures. And so all of it flows from God. And we have to recognize that instead of just absorbing sort of the background radiation of the times in which we live, which want us to be materialists. They want us to deny the existence of the supernatural. They want to say that well, that happened because of gravity or because of X or Y or Z. Maybe it did. Maybe there is a physical explanation for something that happened. That does not in fact preclude it from also being miraculous.

32:27 If something that is a one in a billion chance happens, and it just so happens to be the thing for which many Christians were praying, you should absolutely view that as a miracle. Was it within the realm of the possible given the physical reality of the universe? Sure. That doesn't preclude it from being a miracle. Yes, there are times where God does things like raise someone from the dead, not these days typically, but those things are undeniably a miracle because they are fully outside of what happens in the physical world, according to natural laws, men do not come back from the dead. Cancer can go into remission, without seemingly any reason for it having done so. But as a Christian, if you are If you are praying for

33:16 a loved one who has cancer and you are praying for that to go into remission and it does, yes, you should thank the doctors who were working on that, who did their duty, who helped, but you must give ultimate thanks to God, because that is a miracle. And God did give that to you. That's providential. The fact that doctors exist is providential in that case. So just because you have a physical explanation does not mean that you deny the existence of the supernatural and the miraculous. Again, this is a matter of falling off one side or the other of the horse. You have to stay on the horse. You don't want to fall off the cliff side, that's certainly worse, but you also don't want to fall off the other side of

33:56 the horse. As a general rule, you want to stay on the horse when you are riding the horse. And so don't chalk everything up to the physical, don't become a materialist or a deist, but simultaneously don't fall off the enthusiastic side, where you attribute absolutely everything to some sort of detailed fatalistic plan that God has, where he dictates every second of your life. That's not the way that God has organized the universe because that isn't what he wanted. He did not want us to be automata. He could have created robots if he wanted that. He absolutely could have done that, and some creatures do approach that to a certain degree. Ants don't really have free will. Man is something different.

34:40 He has given us a level of freedom that is different from the animals, not just different in degree, but different in kind. And so as his creatures, as the pinnacle of his creation, it is incumbent on us to recognize that he is still active in his in his creation. It's not the clockwork universe. He didn't wind up the universe, step back, and then watch it go. God is still intimately involved in creation. Every cell division happens because God wills it to happen because God permits it to happen. Nothing happens without God's approval, in the sense of Him permitting it to happen. Not in the sense that He says it is good, because again, there is evil in the world, but everything happens because God permits

35:29 it, and many things happen because God wills it and God directs it by intervening in creation. To give you a sense of how God speaks of himself in these terms, it's important to look at a number of passages in scripture. In Revelation 4, when John is receiving his vision from God when he's effectively in heaven. Here's what he records. And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in the front and behind. The first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight, and the four living creatures each of them with six wings are full of

36:14 eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the Seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever. The twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. Now I highlight this passage because this is the very second thing that's said in heaven. the angels are testifying to the Trinity, holy, holy, holy, the Lord

37:06 God Almighty. And then the twenty four elders surrounding the throne testify that God is the creator of all things and by his will they exist and were created. that's a present ongoing thing. Existence is because God wills it. And so when we talk about God's will being active in the universe, this is the root of it. It's not that God is simply doing fiddly stuff here and there because he's a bored tinkerer. It's because everything is sustained because he desires it. You know, I talked recently, I I mentioned that God chooses to kill the damned eternally rather than annihilating them. And although I didn't say it out loud at the time, I I thought it, but I didn't get to the point. It's crucial to mention that the reason that the damned are not

37:57 simply winked out of existence, is that they were brought into existence by God's will. It was God's will from before eternity that they be created, not for destruction. They chose to be destroyed. But God did not err by creating them. And so the fact that men choose to rebel against God and to hate him with their whole lives is the reason that they are damned and they're not winked out of existence, they're not annihilated, they're resurrected from the dead just like the rest of us. Because God didn't make a mistake when he made them either. God wills everything into existence. The things that he created were created for a purpose, and God's purpose was perfect. And so his act of preservation of all things, it's not random.

38:41 He's not some kid with a simulator. This is everything that God desires to be. And so, of course, we find him to be active in the world around us. This is also testified later on in Revelation fourteen, when a passage I use frequently because it's so challenging to a lot of Christian views of things, John records. Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people, and he said with a loud voice, fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come, and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the seas, and the Springs of Water. Part of the Eternal Gospel is that God is creator, once again,

39:30 and it specifically names things that he created. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and the springs of water. Why those things, we don't know. I'm sure there's some specific spiritual import. To me, just reading it superficially without trying to dig into it, I see it as correlating to all the other passages. God created everything. And so there are angels flying in heaven and their eternal gospel is God is a creator of all these things. And we should fear God because of it. We did an entire episode on the fear of God precisely for this reason. God is the God of all things because He is the creator of all things. We belong to Him. We obey Him. Not because it's a good idea. Not because it's a specific religion that teaches us a better way

40:13 to live. We recognize that we are his creatures, we are his property, we are functionally his slaves, not in the sense of being beat down, not in the sense of being unloved. And he elevates us as sons of God. But we are creatures nevertheless. We belong to him. And by whatever title we're received as believers, the simple fact is that we fall on our face knowing that God is almighty in a way that's incomprehensible. That's exactly what John did. It's also recorded in Colossians 1. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or powers or principalities, all things have been created through him and for him.

41:04 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. This is there's a lot packed into this passage that reveals a great deal about the structure of the universe in without detail, but with a sense of what's going on. Crucially, the sun, the image of God, he's a cornerstone of creation, and in him all things hold together. This is the very sustenance that was mentioned in the previous passage. God is creating and sustaining by his will through the Son, the Word by whom all things were made is the Word through whom all things were redeemed. That is Jesus Christ. This is it's an active participation in the sustenance of all things, great and small. And so, you know, one of the reasons I I talk occasionally

41:53 about astronomy and I I don't know much about it. I I'm a dilettante at best. I just check in every once in a while because I think it's really cool and I'll never grow up about that. I think having a childlike wonder about these things is part of being an adult, it should be part of being a Christian to see something really cool and say, wow, that's amazing. If you ever get too cool for school, you have really missed the boat because this stuff it's beautiful. And when we see it, we should remember all of these things. It's not that it's just a pretty painting in the sky. It's not that it's a bunch of really big numbers that are almost inconceivable. It's that God is doing all those things.

42:30 And the difference between the Christian interacting with that sort of knowledge and the atheist unbeliever interacting with the same universe is that you will very commonly hear them say, Oh, it's it's such a big empty void and we're nothing. We're absolute nothing monkeys on a nothing planet in a nothing galaxy. We're nothing. There's no point to any of it. It's just emptiness and despair. That's really their conclusion to seeing God's glory. The Christian has the exact opposite view. The more we learn about the universe, the bigger we understand it is. In fact, I think most people don't realize that until just over a century ago, in fact less than a century ago, we had no proof that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way.

43:14 We thought that our galaxy was it. We had seen other galaxies, we called them nebulae, but we didn't realize that they were really far away. And there'd been some speculation and there was some arguing just over a century ago, but it wasn't till Edwin Hubble proved it with a telescope and doing some calculations that made him very famous, that we realized that those things were so far away that they weren't local. the distant was so distant they was in fact outside of our own galaxy. And those nebulae that we were seeing, they were spinning like our own galaxy and like atoms and like whirlpools and like these patterns that repeat at every molecular scale, from the most infinitesimally small to

43:56 the incomprehensibly large. Every time we see that rotary pattern playing out, what Hubble Hebel discovered was that those nebulae that Kant had speculated existed over 150 years previously, turned out they were real. And they were in fact distant as a few had hypothesized. They were outside of our galaxy, which meant that suddenly the universe was way more universal than we thought before. Everything was a whole lot bigger. And so the more the astronomers and those other physicists delve into the size and the mysteries of the universe purely in physical realm, the more they reveal just how powerful God is. They've reached the absolute limits of Of what we're able to discern with our instrumentation.

44:46 And there's you know a lot of theory involved, and again, unfortunately, they're virtually all pagans, so they only believe in evolution. They don't believe in a creator. They're trying to find where creation came in the Big Bang while denying that there was any entity that was involved. And one of the particularly funny things about the discoveries that have happened in the last number of decades is that now they're struggling continuously with what they call dark matter and dark energy. And between the two of those, those two forces, the mass energy of dark matter and dark energy makes up ninety five percent of the universe. We have very precise measurements now of well not precise, but fairly

45:33 accurate, and in some ways they're fairly precise. Measurements of the scale of the universe. And we can certainly look at you know particular galaxies, we can calculate what we see, and we can calculate the masses of what's observable, and we can calculate the motion, and from those calculations, it's entirely possible to derive the scientific fact that there is a bunch of matter and there's a bunch of energy that's missing from the calculations. It's called the baryonic universe is the stuff that the matter that we know about. And there's this dark stuff. They call it dark. They don't know what it is. There's a force that's acting on the universe that's completely indestructible to our scientific instruments.

46:14 And so a great deal of energy is being spent in the scientific realm trying to find where's the dark matter, where's the dark energy. The measurements seem like they have to be right. They're clearly measuring something. And yet the math doesn't add up. If you just look at the observable universe, the observable mass in a galaxy and do the calculations for how those that matter should be interacting, it's all off. It's off by a substantial factor. And so when you add in the fudge factor of the dark matter and the dark energy, suddenly those interactions make sense. You can make them add up by adding a variable that's not detectable. And And I'm gonna share something that's probably the wildest idea that I have.

46:55 It's not scriptural. It's not anti scriptural. it's purely theoretical on my pers my perspective. So take it or leave it, entirely possible. I'm prong. My personal theory is that when they have measured all of the universe, they're measuring all these galaxies and nebulae, all these things so far away, and it's these scales, and they're finding this dark matter and dark energy that's not adding up. I think that they're measuring supernatural interaction. I think that they're measuring the actions of angels at those scales. It's entirely possible. I'm wrong. It may well be that they find a physical reason that is suddenly detectable and measurable. It's already measurable and detectable, but if they can identify and say,

47:37 Yeah, it's actually this natural occurrence, it doesn't really change anything because it's still God acting. I just find it very conspicuous that when we look at things like Colossians one, where it talks about the thrones and dominions and powers and principalities, those are all part of the the hierarchies of angels. And there are a few different taxonomies that have emerged over the millennia of how God has ordered the angels. You can pick one. I've spent maybe three hours of my entire life sort of very briefly looking at it, I don't really care. It's clear that these distinctions exist in the hierarchy of angels. But what I find important for thinking about this is the yeah, the one of the common hierarchies is angels and archangels, which we

48:25 know about. And then there are principalities and powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, and cherubim and seraphim. And we know that the cherubim and seraphim are interacting at the throne of God, that they exist in God's presence. And then there are various bits and pieces where there are a few passages that tell us a little bit about what some of the others are doing. For example, principalities. There's the references in Daniel to the Prince of Purdue we've talked about once before. Again, this stuff is there's very little said about it in scripture because there's very little we need to know. If we needed to know more, God would have told us more. All God has done is mentioned just as an aside, yeah, this

49:06 stuff exists too. As Christians we don't need to worry about it, and so I don't, and I don't want to engender a bunch of excitement and listeners to say oh I gotta delve into this stuff because you end up like Michael Heiser, where you take one little bit that's in one book and extrapolate this whole universe of myth, of fan fiction, basically. Please don't do that. What I find interesting is that when you look at things like the principalities that we know interact with nations, with human nations, we know that there are scales beyond that. And so personally, my theory, again, maybe completely wrong, but I think I'll find out when I'm dead. And it matters not one way either way. I think it's possible that one of the larger scales, one of

49:49 the things where we see entire galaxies being held together by invisible forces, I think it may well be that those are angelic forces doing that. Like I said, it's a wild theory. I don't know if anyone else has ever said that. Don't care. You shouldn't put any stock in it, you shouldn't particularly interesting. I find it interesting just because when I look at the scientists measuring creation and God talks about his creation and talks about these orders and doesn't really tell us what they're doing. And then we find these huge gaps at these stellar scales. Like, huh? There's something invisible. There's something that seems to be supernaturally interacting with matter. I know one example where that happens.

50:31 I wonder if that's it. So it's pie speculation doesn't go beyond that. But the only reason I share that is I think it's crucial for us as Christians to at least leave open the possibility that the God who has revealed all these things, who's talked about how the cherubim and seraphim in heaven, when they're testifying to him being the creator, and the twenty-four elders are falling on their faces, testifying that he is sustaining the world. And Colossians testifies that Christ sustains the whole world as its cornerstone. World not being earth, world being the entire universe, all the heavens and the earth. All those things are God's active sustenance of his good creation. Everything that he made was for a reason.

51:18 So I don't see a void out there. I see God's glory at a scale that all you can do is wonder. You can't understand it. the people who think they can don't understand it any better than the people who just, you know, it's it's it's the the bell curve meme where you have the the far left, uh the bell curve and the far right both just kind of staring up in wonder and it's the people in the middle that have very detailed explanations for what's going on. Everyone else just think wow that's really big and cool. It's not just big and cool. It's also God doing his stuff. And he's testifying to his own glory when he does it. And so as Christians, it's not that we sh need to fixate on I gotta figure out how this thing or that thing works.

52:02 Just receive what you see. When God says here is the full scale what I do, when God says I sustain the entire universe by my will, that what I've created is very good and I preserve it by my will, take that seriously. And then at the very small scale, rather than being an atheist or being a deist, when these small things happen, when you have a good meal, give thanks for it. That's no less miraculous than the scale of a galaxy. The fact that we have these good things right in front of us every day. It's God's providence. It is God actively working in our world and our lives for our benefit and for the benefit of all mankind. There are blessings that accrue only to the elect, and there are blessings that accrue to everyone simply by virtue of being in creation.

52:49 And so I I highlight this distinction of scales between what Corey was saying a minute ago and what I'm pointing to here to emphasize that if you hear God's providence acting in lives and maybe you personally feel like you're not a party of that, like well, I don't know if that includes me. I don't know if I get any of the good stuff. Look around you. Do you have air in your lungs? Do you have a full belly? Has that happened in the last 24 hours? God is blessing you. God is blessing all of us. And And when we fail to recognize that sort of miraculous interaction at the most trivial level, we're gonna miss when the really big miracles occur. And there are prophecies and we'll get to maybe in this episode

53:33 or and certainly in future episodes. They're promises that have yet to be fulfilled. And one of the real dangers for us, a pet especially in these days where things seem f so fraught, is is if we're completely checked out. If we think that well, God doesn't really do anything anymore and yeah, you know, he promises he's gonna do stuff, you know, the Bible and we'll have our faith and sing songs, but you know, that's kind of the it for Christianity. There's no more out there's nothing else to it. Yeah If that's all there is, we don't have anything to share with the world. And we have no way to reach our neighbors and say, look, there's stuff going on around you that I can help explain. And it's not just the gospel in the sense the the gospel

54:15 reductionists have treated it. There's a lot more going on in scripture than most people want to talk about. It's one of the reasons that people enjoy Stone Choirs. It we'll delve into stuff that's not like it's not weird or esoteric. It's just it's other places where God said other stuff. When God calls that the eternal gospel and revelation, we should take it seriously. That is good news that God is to be feared and that God has created the entire universe. That is the gospel, just as much as Christ dying and rising again from the dead. Because the reason he did that is that he is the creator and sustainer of all things. All this works for God's glory, and all of it is to our benefit, but only if we have eyes to see and ears

54:55 to hear. One of the surest signs that atheism is not true is the fact that it cannot recognize beauty. And one of the places, as Woe mentioned, where that is the most obvious, is that atheists cannot find any actual beauty when they look at the universe. When you actually find somewhere that still has a nighttime sky with out too much light pollution and you can actually see the stars, they don't see beauty. They see themselves as a speck, as nothing. They don't see the majesty, the awe of God's creation, and a philosophy, a worldview that has no place for beauty in it is just obviously patently false. It cannot be true. Because again we could speak of the transcendentals and the transcendentals being

55:49 one, and so truth and beauty. If your worldview has no beauty in it, it simply cannot be true. But we should also mention it's worth considering. When you look at the grand scale, when you look at the universe, when you look at galaxies, when you look at these megastructures, and they are structures, it is organized, there is a design, a very obvious design behind it, but when you look at the grandest scale of the universe itself, bear in mind, the very same forces that make all of that work that are holding that together are the forces that are holding you to the planet and that make your body work. The same physical rules that God set for the universe work from the smallest scale all the way up to the grandest scale.

56:43 Yes, we do not yet have a unified theory, and so we have trouble transitioning our explanations from the grand scale to the infinitesimally tiny scale, or vice versa. But they are the same. They are all governed by rules, by constants set by God. And so the very same sort of thing that is holding together that distant galaxy and making it behave as it does. Well those are the very same rules, the very same sorts of constraints and constants and constructs that are holding you together. That's the unified glory, that's the beauty of God's creation. And so don't think of yourself as a speck because that's entirely the wrong way to go about it. That's not what a Christian would do. When a Christian sees creation, when we discover something new in w

57:36 whatever field it happens to be, whether it's biology or astronomy or something else, the Christian sees that discovery as revealing a little bit of God's glory that he hid in his creation, that he hid in nature. Because as we've mentioned many times before, all truth is not contained in Scripture. Scripture contains the things that we need to know for certain purposes, it most certainly and most saliently contains the gospel. But there are other truths as well. There are things that God put into, for instance, creation, that we can discover through these various methods that we have discovered or devised, depending on how you want to look at that. God did not just put the truth in one book.

58:26 He wrote two books. The truth is contained in both of them, and so we can see the glory of God in both of those, and we should see the glory of God in both of those as Christians. When it comes to the topic of Providence, which is of course the topic for this episode, that's going to be dealing largely with nature, with the natural world, with creation, with the universe. Because God has so organized and so ordained things that Things in the universe that they do work to our benefit. Even in the fallen state of creation, the ground still produces food for us, trees still produce fruit, animals are still able to reproduce, and so are human beings. All of these various blessings from God are still present, even in

59:16 creation's fallen state. All of those are providential. They are all provided by God. We can turn to the words of Christ in the New Testament, and he frequently speaks of this providence, of this activity of God in creation, providing for us and taking care of us. And so from Matthew seven, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be open to you, for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened, or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, if you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your

1:00:05 Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him? This should certainly be incentive to pray. God has promised He will answer prayers. God has promised He will provide good things. He doesn't necessarily require that we ask for all of the good things that He provides for us. We know that is not the case because the rain falls on the wicked and the good alike. God provides food for all flesh, not just those who believe, not just those who are numbered amongst the elect. But God does promise to bless us when we ask him for those blessings. God is not stingy, God is not going to be miserly with his gifts. If we ask God for good things, he does promise that he will provide good things for us.

1:00:57 That doesn't mean that you pray for a million dollars and God gives you a million dollars. That's not how this worked. God is not a genie. Anyway, you probably don't want the mythological version of the genie, there's always a string attached somewhere. God provides things that are actually good. God provides the things that you actually need, the things that will work out for your benefit in the long run, because that's of course the ultimate goal here, is to persevere, is to run the race successfully. God can see the beginning from the end, and so God knows if he gives you a good thing at this point, he can see the outcome, he can see everything that flows out from that. You cannot do that trapped here in time.

1:01:41 No human being can do that. That's impossible for us. But God has promised that if we ask him, he will provide good things, this is again providence, he has providential care for us as his sons and daughters. Not only will he provide those good things, but he will also do it in a way that will work out ultimately to our benefit. Because we see that in many places in Scripture where He promises that these things work together for the good. And to read another passage from Christ this time Luke twelve. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body what you will put on, for life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse

1:02:29 nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And which of you, by being anxious, can at a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field to day, and to morrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith? And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried, for all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need

1:03:13 them. Instead, seek His kingdom, and these things will be added to you. God not only provides for us to some degree regardless of whether or not we pray for it, and regardless of whether or not we believe, because again, God has a certain level of providence that covers the entirety of creation. Gravity continues to work whether you're a Christian or not. If you apostatize, you don't just float off the planet. The rain continues to fall whether you are a Christian or not. Now, of course, God does act in time with regard to things like weather. And so if we have severe weather, to a certain degree to a certain degree as Christians, we should recognize that, in the sense of severe weather in that case, as a judgment from God.

1:04:06 Because God controls these things. It's not just, oh, it's a natural occurrence and it's because of this temperature change here and that and this and Yes, perhaps you can explain it physically. But why did it happen? When you explain how something happened physically, you're not explaining the why in the sense of the metaphysical or the philosophical. That's the more important matter, and as Christians, we often have an answer for that. If there is a major disaster that befalls a country, turn to God. That may very well be a judgment from God, or perhaps it's a test from God. We can't always say exactly why it happened or exactly what God is communicating with it. But we know that in all things we must turn to God.

1:04:54 This is what we see in Job. This is why Woe and I like the book of Job so much, and a number of other reasons as well, but it shows a proper response to these things. Whether it is good from God or evil from God in the sense of something that from our point of view is harmful, and in an objective sense, in a certain way, is indeed harmful. It is harmful to lose all of your cattle, to lose your children, and to be covered in sores. Those things are harmful. They work out for the good, even in Job's case they work out for the good. And so if your nation is struck by some sort of major disaster, you turn to God. If your nation is blessed by God, you still turn to God, you thank Him for those blessings.

1:05:42 In the case of the major disaster, of course, you ask for God to relent. It is perfectly fine to ask for mercy, to ask for God to turn to you to bless you. But you also recognize that he does the things he does for a reason. It may very well be that your nation is wicked and needs to turn from its wickedness. And so, yes, to return to the rain. Rain falls on the wicked and the righteous alike, but it is God alone who determines whether or not the rain falls when your crops need it. If there is a drought, God permitted it or God willed it. If the rain falls in its season and your crops are bountiful, that is also from God. That is God's providence. You should praise him and thank him for that.

1:06:26 And as Woe said, the best way to start doing that sort of thing is just to say a short prayer before every meal, before and after if you're so inclined, as the small catechism recommends. You could say the short blessing that is very common to hear among Lutherans and some others, or just say the Lord's Prayer, which also takes very little time to say. That is the way that Christ instructed us to pray, it is an excellent prayer to pray before a meal. Takes very little time. Time, of course, shouldn't be our major concern, but it's not wrong to have some concern for time. You can't say a three hour prayer before every meal, certainly. That wouldn't even be Krishna at that point because you would be

1:07:04 avoiding things that you should be doing. But you can return thanks to God, and it does not take much of your time, and it puts you in the right mindset, which is another part of this, it's very important. Yes, it is important to return thanks to God because it's just important to do that. But also when you return that thanks, when you give thanks for your food, whether it's food you're about to enjoy or food you've already enjoyed, you are recognizing that all blessings, all good things flow from God. And so the next time something goes well, you will be more inclined to immediately recognize this is a blessing from God. This is a good thing that flows from God. This is providence. This is not just luck or my skill or my hard work.

1:07:50 There's more at play here because there's a deeper aspect to life, to everything, to the universe, than the material, than just what I've done, the work that I've done, the labor I've put in. And so having that mindset, you will be able to give thanks to God. Maybe it's you get a major contract at work or you get a promotion or something just goes well in your day, could be something as small as you find your keys that you thought you had actually lost. Give thanks to God. You may think it is silly or trivial to thank God for something like that. Start doing it. See how that works out in your life. It is important to recognize that even these small things are from God, because again, from the smallest scale quarks interacting or atoms interacting,

1:08:44 molecules, up to the grandest scale of galaxies and clusters, all of that is in God's hands. All of that is upheld by God. All of that exists because God willed it, because God creates it, and because God sustains it. Absolutely nothing exists by itself and in itself. Nothing self-subsists except for God. And so everything else is upheld by God. It exists because God wills that it continue to exist. And so of course we should give thanks to God for small things and for great things, and so again, if you lose your keys and find them, thank God. If you have a child born and the child is healthy, thank God. Thank God if the child is sick as well, of course, because all children are a blessing from God.

1:09:36 Pray for the child who is ill. But recognize that there are levels of blessing, and every single one of those things can be a blessing. So you have a child who is born, that's a blessing. The child is healthy, that's a blessing. The Christian must recognize this as it were pervasive providence of God. It's not that God just acts in this little place or that little place or we thank him only for the big miracles someone came back from the dead or cancer disappeared or war was averted. We thank him for all things because all things are in his life hands, and all good things flow from him. Scripture is very clear on this point. Every good and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.

1:10:22 Scripture states that every good thing we have comes from God. All of it is providential. And so we recognize, as Christians, that providence, and we give thanks for it. And I will continue to recommend the Lord's Prayer. Not just because it is the prayer that Christ recommended. The apostles asked him how should we pray? And he gave them a prayer. We should certainly use that. It would be unwise to ignore that fact. But also because it is the perfect prayer. We thank God for the things that He gives us, because of course when you thank God for your daily bread, you're thanking him for everything. You're not thanking him for just literally your daily bread. the small catechism covers this very well.

1:11:11 I recommend that you go and read that. I will link to it in the show notes. But when you thank him for that, you're thanking him for providence. You're thanking him for all of the things that he has providentially provided for you. And of course there are the other parts where you confess your sins known and unknown, etc. It is highly recommended. Pray the prayer at least when you wake up and before you go to bed. Add that into your routine. Part of the Christian life is having a set routine for some of these things. Because again, it puts you in the right mindset and it starts to develop that relationship with God. Not in the sense of, you know, Christianity in the modern culture, they try to say, well, it's a relationship, not a religion.

1:11:58 That's not what I'm saying. But you should have a relationship with God. Because God has adopted you as a son or daughter, and you have a relation, you should have a relationship with your parents, in this case with your heavenly father. That's part of the Christian walk, and part of that is talking to God, which is what prayer is. God talks to us as well, which is why you should read His Word. Particularly if you do those two things together, and have the Holy Spirit, because that is of course what it means to be a Christian, God is going to lead you into deeper understanding of the faith, into a deeper and more profound faith, because He speaks to you in His Word, and you pray to Him, you speak back

1:12:39 to Him in prayer. God hasn't designed these things idly or without reason. All of this is meant to work together. And so when you recognize God's providential hand in creation and you thank him for these things and you pray and then you read scripture, you are going to become a better Christian. That's what it means to have this Christian walk, this running of the race. You aren't supposed to stay on the diet of milk. You're supposed to progress. You're supposed to move on to meat. And in order to do that, you do actually have to put in some effort and some time. You shouldn't view them as laborious or as labor or suffering. That's not the point. You're not a monk, you don't wear a hair shirt and pray

1:13:29 by yourself on a concrete floor while kneeling. That isn't how you worship or give glory to God. God has given you certain things in this life. He has given you a family. Whether you have a family of your own or you just have parents and extended family, you have a family. All of these things, all these blessings that God has given you, you are supposed to use them and respond to God with thanks for them. Not shut yourself away from the world and ignore them. That's not how you serve God. You serve God by serving your fellow man, by serving your neighbor. You are in a very concrete way God's hands and feet in the world because God works through means. As we've mentioned a number of times, the good things that you receive in life will often come from

1:14:21 the hands of other men. That's because God is providing those things using the means of those other men. As we've noticed, God does not just have food typically fall from the sky. He has done that, he could do that. Typically food comes from farmers. Food grows on trees, grows in fields. Those are means that God uses to provide the good food, to provide the things that we need to sustain this earthly life. That is providential. Those things don't just happen. God designed it so that they would happen, so they would work that way, because that is God's providence for us in creation. And so if we start to recognize in the small things every meal we eat, or if we have some small thing happen to

1:15:16 us that's good, it's easier to recognize God's hand in bigger things and other things. Really, what I'm saying is that you have to cultivate a Christian worldview. Which is in contrast, stark contrast, to the modern worldview that is rampant in our society, because our society is by and large not atheistic, it's pagan, it has many gods, it just does not recognize the Lord God. But it is largely materialistic. Yes, there's some incoherence in that, but that's sort of a feature, not a flaw. For Satan in this case, of course. But as Christians, we want to cultivate this worldview that recognizes that God is not just in control. God is not just sitting on his throne, although of course he is, but he is still involved in creation.

1:16:10 He actively sustains creation. He works for the good of his faithful. He works for the good of his elect. That is the Christian worldview. Deism is not a Christian worldview where you just view God as watching if he's even doing that. Maybe he's off taking a nap in the deist worldview. That's not Christian. That is a sub Christian worldview. Is it better to recognize there's a God than say there's no God? Absolutely. But it doesn't compare whatsoever to recognizing the reality of how the Lord God interacts with his creation, how he interacts with us, and returning thanks for what he does. That's the Christian life. So as Corey mentioned, Job is one of the books that again is really, I think, essential for understanding the non-deist approach to research

1:17:05 whatever happens in life. So I'm gonna read from chapter one and then from chapter two, I'm gonna skip a little bit. I just want to focus in on the parts that that hone in on the point that we're making here today. And the Lord said to Satan, Have you diligently considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a man blameless, true, godly, abstaining from everything evil? Then the devil answered, and said, Before the Lord, Does Job worship the Lord for nothing? Have you not made a hedge around him, and about his household, and around all his possessions? And have you not blessed the works of his hand and multiplied his cattle upon the land. Put forth your hand and touch all that he has, verily he

1:17:49 will bless you to your face. Then the Lord said to the devil, Behold, I give into your hand all that he has, but touch not himself. So the devil went out from the presence of the Lord. And then next thing that happened was that raiders came and stole all of Job's oxen and his female donkeys and killed all his slaves. And then the second messenger came and said, Fires burned up all of the sheep and the shepherds. And then a third messenger interrupted the second and said, An army came and stole all of his camels and killed all of his slaves. And while the third servant was speaking, a fourth messenger approached and said a wind has blown over his children's house and killed them all beneath the roof that collapsed.

1:18:30 And all this happened in the span of a few minutes. So the text continues. So Job arose, and rent his garments, and shaved the hair of his head, and fell upon the earth and worshiped, and said, I myself came forth naked from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, as it seemed good to the Lord, so it has come to pass. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And all these events that befell him Job sinned not at all before the Lord, and did not impute folly to God. So you may have noticed that verse 21 there was a little bit longer than the ones you've probably heard before. This is of course the Septuagint because it's what God inspired. That portion there that said, the Lord gave, the Lord is taken

1:19:15 away. As it seemed good to the Lord, so it has come to pass. Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's a part that's deleted from the Masoretic text. It's really a crucial one because it explains precisely why he's thinking the way he is, which is why the next verse says, Job did not sin and did not impute folly to God. What that means specifically, it's not simply talking about sin or about evil. To say that Job did not impute folly to God references back to him saying it seemed good to the Lord, so it has come to pass. He just lost everything that God ever blessed him with. He still had his life, and he still had his wife. Everything else had been destroyed. And he didn't blame Satan. He didn't say it wasn't fair.

1:20:00 He said, Blessed be the name of the Lord. He said, All those things that God gave me, God has seen fit to take away. He obviously didn't like it, he didn't understand, but he trusted in God. And this is a crucial element of the Christian approach to God's providence in our lives. There are times when bad things happen you're not going to understand. I referenced this passage in the Fear of the Lord episode and I described having a stroke for precisely the reason that when bad things happen, you can either whine about it or you can say, I don't understand, but I trust in God. I'm still in his hands no matter what. this belief that we are to carry as Christians, one that is entirely not materialistic, that's not deistic, one that believes that God is

1:20:45 active and the things that happen, for good or ill, are from the hand of God, rob Satan of any power whatsoever. Job wasn't terrified by Satan, even though it was Satan's hand that had caused these things with God's permission. Job said, The Lord permitted it, blessed be the name of the Lord. And then it continues in chapter two. The devil went back to the divine counsel and said, It's written, and the Lord said to the devil, have you then observed my servant Job, that there is none of men upon the earth like him, a harmless, true, blameless, godly man, abstaining from all evil? And yet he cleaves to innocence, whereas you have told me to destroy his substance without cause? And the devil answered and said to the Lord, skin for skin,

1:21:29 all that a man has will he give as a ransom for his life. Nab put forth your hand and touch his bones and his flesh. Truly he will bless you to your face. And the Lord said to the devil, Before I deliver him up to you only save his life. So the devil went out from the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from his feet to his head, and he took a pot shar to scrape away the discharge and sat upon a dung heap outside of the city. And when much time had passed his wife said to him, How long will you hold out, saying, Behold, I will wait yet a little while, expecting hope for my deliverance, for behold, your memorial is abolished from the earth, even your sons and daughters, the pangs and pains of my womb, which I bore in vain with sorrows, and

1:22:15 yeah and you yourself sit down to spend the nights in the open air among the corruption of worms and I am a wanderer and a servant from place to place and house to house, waiting for the setting of the sun, that I may rest for my labours and my pangs which now beset me, but say some word against the Lord and die. But he looked on her and said to her, You have spoken like one of the foolish women, but we have received good things from the hand of the Lord. Shall we not endure evil things? In all these things that happened to him, Job sinned not at all with his lips before God. You may have noticed that that verse nine was really long, wasn't it? You've never heard that before, probably. This is again the Septuagint.

1:22:56 The reason the the foolishness that came from the wife of Job's lips was far more detailed than was preserved in the Masoretic text. It's not remotely what was said. It was a wicked and profoundly selfish Really, she fulfilled the entire curse against Eve in this little soloquy that she delivered. She made it all about her, and she was certainly suffering too, but she blamed Job and blamed God, and she was in his ear telling him to sin against God. Not for the first time have we seen a wife encouraging a husband to sin. When Job attributes for a second time the evil that this passage makes explicit came from the hand of Satan. first passage leaves it somewhat ambiguous. Satan approached God and said You should do evil to Job and

1:23:48 he'll curse you. And the Lord said to the devil, you go do it, and we'll see. And then Satan went and the bad things happened, but it isn't explicit who did the bad things. The second time around is very clear that Satan acted directly against Job, and Job again says, If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, shall we not endure evil things? So as I alluded to in my intro, there are cases where bad things happen to us, evil things happen. And in a sense, it is okay to say that God has permitted or God has delivered these things unto us as chastisement, even if we don't understand why. Even if all we understand is that we live in a fallen sinful world and bad things seem to happen for no reason.

1:24:34 The crucial part is not to be a materialist that says, well there's no reason. It's all just a void, and there's no point to any of it. The Christian response is to say I have no idea what's going on, but I trust that God is still God. When we have that confident faith, no matter how bad things get, they can get worse than they got for Job. He didn't die. He wasn't close to death. He was miserable. He was unbelievably miserable, but his life was being sustained. That was part of the problem. God didn't let Satan kill him or bring him close to death, he just brought him to the lowest of all human lows. We can get there. There are men alive today who have gone to very similar places. And they didn't fall as far, but they've been just as bad

1:25:16 off in the end. The Christian view of these circumstances, these evil circumstances, is not to curse God. It's not to whine and moan and say it's unfair. It's to bless God's name and say that the creator of all things has permitted this. Lord have mercy. And that's sometimes that's all you can say. Lord have mercy. But not curse God when you do it. Not say it's not fair. And see if if you don't believe that these things are possible, these things truly happen, not only in the Bible stories, but actually in real life to us in these days. Then when the bad things do happen, as they inevitably happen to everyone, absent this sort of preexisting view, this sort of hermeneutic of when I see something bad happen, how do I approach it?

1:26:10 Absent this view, you're gonna act just like a pagan. You're gonna say it's all void, there's nothing, it's all blackness, I curse God and I wanna die. There's no point any of it. I hate it. It's all about me. You turn inward. That's the natural thing. That's what Satan wants. That's what he wanted when he made this arrangement with God. He said if you let me torment this man who's been blessed with so much, he's gonna curse you to his face. And interestingly, the Septuagint didn't even say curse. It says he will bless you to your face. It wouldn't go so far even as to record the sort of blasphemy that Satan was wishing. So the the notion that Job would bless God to his face, it was tongue in cheek.

1:26:52 It was an ironic statement, but it was one that preserved the sanctity of the text. As Christians, we have to have this in our hearts and in our minds when things are good. You know, a lot of the episodes that we do are in view of preparing people for bad times. You specifically we did the episode last year about normalcy bias. At some point the lights are going to go out, the podcasts are going to go away. You're going to have much bigger things to worry about than you know superficial internet stuff. You're going to have very immediate needs to tend to. And when those days come, if you haven't gotten these things squared away and many other things, it's gonna be too late. And so when we exhort listeners to think about these things now,

1:27:38 it's not simply to sort of shake you from your slumber and get you excited about something. It's specifically to exercise muscles that have atrophied so that when these days come to each of us, whether it's in some global calamity or it's just your own personal life, when everything's fine for everybody else and you seem to be singled out in these terrible moments, to be prepared as a Christian is to receive things as Job received them. He didn't sin against God, and not initially, and then at the end, after having finally challenged God and wind, when God showed up, as we've said many times in Job thirty eight and following, go read the whole thing, when Job challenged God and God shows up,

1:28:21 he says exactly what the angels in heaven are saying. He says, I'm the creator of all things. Who are you? Where were you when I did all of these things? When I created all these things, when I sustain all these things throughout the universe, where are you, Job? Who are you to speak to me and to challenge my judgment? That is the response of God to when we step out of line, when we don't have the sort of supplicative view that we're supposed to have as creatures. If we get too big for our britches and we think that we have the standing to challenge God's judgment, then we're put in our place. And so our exhortation to listeners is don't let that be your mental state. So that when things are really bad and the mental goes out

1:29:06 the window and all you have left is the emotional and the the anchoring of of your faith and your training, you will have been trained in such a way that the instinctual response will still be a Christian one. But absent thinking about these things, the instinctual response is going to be the one that Job's wife had. When she said curse God and die as a wicked response and as default response of men, it is our default response. When things get bad, we say, Well, this isn't fair, I don't like this. God, you're terrible. I'm gonna go another direction. I don't I reject all this. And there are many men who apostatize when things get tough. Scripture talks about that. We talked about that some in the apostasy episode.

1:29:47 There are people who will be Christian when it's easy to be Christian, and then as soon as it gets hard to be Christian, they pop smoke. They're like, I'm gone. This is this is not what I signed up for. I wanted something happy and easy. And I'm getting something that's difficult, that's hard. I don't want it anymore. That is the very moment of the test of the faith when it's proven who is actually true. It doesn't count when it's easy. It doesn't count when it doesn't cost you anything. And to be explicit, this is not us saying that we earn salvation. It's saying that the gifts that God gives us are complete. All of scripture is given to teach us all of these things. And when we start picking and choosing which parts we're going to

1:30:26 believe, we say, well, yeah, Job is a story, but I don't really believe that God created all those things and that they're to his glory. That's I that doesn't interest me. That's some other thing happened in creation. It's got nothing to do with it. I care about the Jesus version of God that's just loving and peaceful and doesn't yell at anybody. He's I like Buddy Christ. That's the one that works for me. Well, that's not God. It's some subset, but it cannot be the true God, because the true God is all of it. And so we point to these neglected parts of scripture that point to the rest of God that are being left out a bunch of preaching. When you look at all of it, suddenly everything makes sense.

1:31:04 And it becomes very easy to have confident faith in the worst of moments. And I realized a couple of weeks ago that even confident faith is redundant. Confident. Confident faith. With faith, faith. It it's a great term because it emphasizes that confidence is exactly what we want all Christians to have. It's what God wants. That's not a stone choir sentiment. God wants us to have faith in Him in all times and in all places, especially the hard ones. When it's two things happen in our lives. Times get easy and we forget about God because it's easy. And then times get tough and we remember God and we curse him because suddenly we realize that God matters and we don't really like what he's doing anymore.

1:31:48 To focus on the Christian life in every day, having the sort of prayer life that Corey was describing, means that you're not going to forget about God when times are good. You're not going to curse God when times get bad. You're going to receive as Job did all things to the glory of God. And once you are there mentally and you're there spiritually, you can also be there emotionally when you're being pulled in every direction and you're being compressed, and you have you have nothing left except whatever tiny kernel of clinging to God you took into the situation. Because you're not going to be able to think clearly, you're only going to have the training in righteousness or the training in futility.

1:32:29 You're going to take some kind of training into those stressful moments. And your training will absolutely kick in. And so when we do episodes like this, it's in hopes the people will be training themselves in God's righteousness. Because when the bad days come, it's gonna be one or the other. Either you're going to respond like Job or you're gonna respond like Job's wife. It's one or the other. And one of those leads to salvation, and one of those leads to damnation. Because to apostatize at the last moment is worse than never having any faith to begin with. Another aspect of providence, of course, is going to be that as Christians we have to recognize that not only is there supernatural good,

1:33:13 but there is also supernatural evil. And so there's a sort of anti-providence, as it were. There's Satan's involvement in these things. We recognize that because to some degree we experience a little bit of that frequently. That's what external temptation is in some cases. It's going to be demonic in origin. Not all of it, but some of it certainly. Satan is very real. Satan has an active role as it were in creation. He is fallen and he is wicked and he wants to drag everyone else down with him. It's not It's not just that misery loves company, it's that Satan hates everything. There is nothing good in him because he is totally turned against and away from God. As Christians, we need to take seriously the fact that there is

1:34:10 a devil, and not only is there a devil, but he took one third of the angels with him when he fell, and so there are many devils. There is a very real spiritual warfare going on every second of every day. Angels don't sleep. There's no lull in this fight. There's no quiet period in the battle. Yes, there may be moments of greater intensity and we certainly see that, and sometimes it is indeed reflected in human history as well. We see very high levels of activity in certain parts of the world, in certain cultures. That's demonic. The demons are encouraging that. They are running the show in some places in some points in history. But that is a battle, that is a war that is going on again, every second of every day, Satan is prowling around

1:35:05 as a lion looking for whom he may devour. The Christian life with regard to these spiritual things is war The life of man upon the earth is warfare. That is true both in the physical realm in many places in many times and in the spiritual realm. We must take that seriously. Many today don't want to think about Satan. They want to ignore it. They want to pretend like there's no supernatural evil. It's just God and we live in a fallen world and so things are rough here, but it's just God and that's fine, we'll we'll all be good in the end. And that's just not the reality of it. Because there is also supernatural evil, and it is seeking to destroy you. Satan doesn't need you to be the most evil person possible.

1:35:54 He doesn't care that much. He just needs you to give him that little opening where you doubt God, or you decide, well, things are rough, so I'll I'll try something else for a while. I'll leave God over here. Maybe I'll come back to it later. I'll try all these things the world has on this buffet for me. Maybe those are better. Satan just wants you to turn away from God. Because if you turn away from God, maybe you never turn back. You may not apostatize in the end, you may turn back to God. God may drag you back to Himself, but that may not happen because apostasy is a very real possibility. You don't lose your faith, as it were. You don't just somehow fall out of faith, but you can reject it. You can turn around and walk away from God.

1:36:47 Scripture is abundantly clear on that point. We spoke of this at length in the apostasy episode, and we've also touched on the subject elsewhere. It's not once saved, always saved. It's not that just because you once believed you will certainly go to paradise, you will certainly persevere until the end. Those are not the terms in which Scripture speaks. There are very real things that drag people down in this life and cause them to apostatize. Which is why we are addressing this subject and why we address so many others. As a Christian, you need to build up your defenses against these things, so that when moments of temptation or trial come along, you have the tools at your disposal to respond to them as would

1:37:37 a Christian. And so they don't cause you to fall away. You aren't the seed that fell on shallow ground, or among thorns. You're the one that fell in the good soil. You've cultivated that. And so you are ready for those trials when they come. Because Satan is going to try to destroy your faith. That is the reality. God has permitted Satan a certain length of leash. And he will use every bit of what he has been given to try to drag you away from God, to try to drag you away from the faith. If you just ignore him, if you pretend he doesn't exist, that is not going to prepare you when the trials come. We're not saying to focus on the demonic, because of course there are those who become obsessed with demons and demonology and all those

1:38:26 things. That is a dark path, it will lead you nowhere good. Rather, what we are saying is that you have to recognize there is spiritual evil, there is supernatural evil. That is part of the Christian life, is recognizing that exists and being ready when those temptations come, when those trials come, when things go bad. Because bad things will happen in this life. It's always the cliche that bad things happen to good people. Why is that? We live in a fallen world. It's actually a very easy question to answer. Bad things happen to good people because one no one is good. All are fallen. All fall short of the glory of God, all are sinful, and we live in a fallen world. But again, we can take confidence in the fact that God has

1:39:15 promised, and I feel like I'm obligated every time we speak on this or related subject to bring up my confirmation verse, but Romans eight is of course something that should always come to mind in these matters. Because of course we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. So even if evil comes, in God's providence He has ordained that it will work out for our good. But you have to recognize in this life Satan is a very real threat. We can turn, of course, to Scripture. So, for instance, John fourteen, I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, he has no power over me, but I do as the Father has commanded me,

1:40:03 so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us be on our way. That is Christ speaking of Satan as the ruler of this world. Yes, Christ is on his throne. Yes, God is on his throne. He rules and controls all things. But he has permitted Satan to act as the ruler of this fallen world. And there are more children of Satan in this world than there are children of God. There are fewer believers than unbelievers in this world. That is just the way that things are. Perhaps it does not necessarily have to be that way. Perhaps we could have more believers if we had a more serious church that actually acted appropriately in the world to spread the word of God instead of constantly yielding to the culture, but that is

1:40:51 a discussion for another time. And there were times in European history certainly where we had a majority of Christians in that particular society. But by and large, and certainly in today's world, the majority of human beings are wicked unbelievers. They are pagans. They are part of Satan's kingdom, not God's kingdom. And Scripture says that the children of Satan are more astute with regard to the things of this life, with regard to the things of this fallen world than are the children of God. We could get into that in greater depth in another episode, perhaps, but that is something that we Something that we as Christians must bear in mind. Just because we have the providence of God, just because we have

1:41:38 these promises of God that things will work out for the good, does not mean that we can just sit and go, well, God's completely in control, I can just do nothing and wait for God to do everything for me. God has given us work to do. We are to work while there is sun, while the day lingers, because the night is coming. That is part of this life is working for the good. Yes, God provides, but you still have things to do. There's still work to be done for Christians in this life, and part of that is pushing back against the kingdom of Satan, pushing back against his children, pushing back against the wickedness that he would try to bring into the world, because he opposes God at every turn, that is all he exists to do.

1:42:26 There is nothing good, nothing redeeming in him, it is only wickedness and spite and hate and malice. That is all Satan has. And he wants to drag everyone else down with him. And again, from 2 Corinthians, to emphasize the point, and even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whom the God of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, so they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, which is the image of God. Satan here is spoken of as the God of this age These are not trivial matters. Satan is not some menstrual character that you just laugh at and he's comical. Now, of course, I'm not saying you can't mock Satan, that's one thing you most certainly can do.

1:43:12 If you are very secure in your faith, feel free to mock Satan. He hates mockery. It's one thing he absolutely hates. Luther writes on this fairly extensively in a number of places, as of other theologians as well. He takes himself very seriously, so he hates to be mocked. And a Christian who is firm in his faith can take the liberty to mock Satan. Because Christ is already one. Our God is one. Satan is defeated. Yes, he lingers for a time in this life, he still has some power in this fallen world, but he is defeated and destined for an eternity of fire, along with all of his children. Both the angels who fell with him and the men who follow him in this life. I'll add one more section from scripture dealing with this important point,

1:44:02 that Satan is the ruler of this world and then perhaps another section from scripture that is comforting, tangentially related, but comforting, as opposed to the idea of Satan being the ruler of the world is not particularly comforting. We can all admit that. But it is the reality, it is what Scripture says, and so we have to take that seriously, and so from John twelve. Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father save me from this hour. But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father God Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven, I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, An angel has spoken to him.

1:44:43 Jesus answered, This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world, now will the ruler of this world be cast out, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. And so even though we see that Satan is, in a sense, the ruler of this world, he has been cast out of the heavenly places. He has been thrown out, he is no longer the accuser of the brethren, which we see, of course, in the book of Job. And so his power is diminished. His power is curtailed. It is circumscribed by God. There is only so much evil that He is permitted to do. And so we can take comfort in that. God is still absolutely in control.

1:45:32 The devil is God's devil. He can do only what God permits him to do. But of course, we can also read from John 16 where there is comfort with regard to this life for Christians. I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the helper will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you, and when he comes he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment And judgment, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me, concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer, concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. Satan is judged, he is damned, he is condemned. But here we see comfort for the Christian because of course the

1:46:22 helper is the Holy Spirit. God has sent the Holy Spirit into the hearts of believers. And so we have that security, we have that promise of our faith, of what our faith will do for us, not just in this life, but in eternity, because that is ultimately, of course, the goal in this life is to reach the next life, is to persevere, is to run the race successfully, in order to reach paradise. And that is what we see here, that is the promise of God with regard to the Holy Spirit. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And again, this is why you need to read scripture and pray. This is how you build this sort of feedback loop, a very positive feedback loop. The Holy Spirit's indwelling is not just what makes us Christians, but

1:47:11 what makes us better Christians. This is the process of sanctification, and it also guards us against the evil one. If you are an unbeliever and you do not have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you, you may as well have a welcome mat laid out for Satan, because there's nothing else in there. Demonic possession was an enormous part of Christ's ministry here on earth. Casting out demons was a huge part of what he did. And the disciples, the apostles did that as well. For many centuries, we sort of neglected that matter. In Europe, of course, in Christendom it was less of a problem because you had a pervasive Christian culture. But we have by and large, particularly in the modern era, given up on the idea that demonic possession is even a thing.

1:48:03 We don't really take the demonic seriously. We don't take demons seriously, not in the sense of giving them honor or respect or anything, but in the sense of realizing that they are a real, a siente, and a significant threat. Demonic possession is a very real thing, and there are demon possessed men walking around today. Likely more and more of them, as our culture, as our civilization, as our world continues its downward trend into greater and deeper apostasy and paganism and wickedness. And so as Christians we have to recognize the demonic is real. You may very well deal with demoniacs in your life. God may not have given you the gift of discernment in order to tell which individuals are or not.

1:48:55 You may have that, you may not. But you have to recognize that it is a very real thing, that it is a possibility. There's a reason that you see exorcisms in the New Testament. There's a reason the churches used to perform exorcisms. We used to do house blessings and all sorts of other things as well. Because we took these matters more seriously, and we should take them seriously again. There is a very real spiritual war going on. And when it comes to spiritual warfare, we as Christians need to be wiser. We have a lot of fools running around, proclaiming themselves Christian, who have no idea how to pursue this, how to fight these battles, how to win this war, or at the very least how to prosecute this war.

1:49:42 And so you'll see completely ridiculous responses to things. If someone stands up and says something that supports Christianity, that supports the Christian worldview. You do not immediately attack him. Whether or not that man is perfect, and of course he won't be because no man is perfect, even if he is a wicked man, if he stands up and supports Christianity, you amplify the positive that he has said. You don't take the opportunity to attack him and tear down what could be. You're destroying a possibility. This is sort of the inverse of you do not interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. If someone is doing something that is beneficial to the Christian side, let him do so. Amplify in so far as it's positive.

1:50:35 There is no benefit, and there is only detriment to tearing down what could be very constructive, what could be a very productive change, a turn for the better. And unfortunately we see many Christians making the wrong choices with regard to this, because it seems like most Christians these days are very bad at dealing with what is not necessarily political, but very similar to it. If you don't know how to navigate these matters, if you don't know how to respond to something like this where a wicked man says something good, or even a man who's just perhaps it more neutral than wicked, the whole church hold your tongue. You are able to simply not comment. I know that our modern world incentivizes men to comment on each

1:51:24 and everything that passes by their eyes, but sometimes let it pass by. If you do not have reason to comment, if you don't have something constructive to add as it were, if you don't know how to respond in an intelligent and a useful way, just hold your tongue. There's nothing wrong with holding your tongue in these circumstances. Sometimes it is the duty of a foot soldier to stand there. Just stand there. Not necessarily, do anything. Maybe you don't have orders at the moment. Just stand there and don't do anything harmful. We need more Christian men to recognize that sometimes that is the best course of action. Part of the inspiration for us doing this episode this week was a comment from Elon just a couple days ago that as of

1:52:16 a couple hours ago had over 114 million views. Over 100 million people saw Elon say this. Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish. This set off a whole bunch of putative Christians on the internet. They were just outraged at the stupidity of the notion that Christianity could perish because of course they know better, because it says that somewhere in the Bible. And so when a man like Elon, who when he was tweeting this, is wearing a Halloween costume that has buffomet on it, it's it's a horned goat. It is a satanic symbol on his chest as he's saying unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.

1:53:05 And this was a lament. He wasn't happy about this, he wasn't celebrating. He is seeing the world burning down. And in his pagan, imperfect way, he's trying to figure out what's going on. He's a very smart guy. He has not nearly enough good influences in his life. So the best he can do is to say, I think maybe Christianity is a better version than this. But of course he doesn't understand what Christianity is. And so the thing that incensed me when this happened a couple days ago is that a whole bunch of people who call themselves Christians did the exact opposite of what Corey just said. When he said Christianity will perish, implying to over a hundred million people, that's a bad thing, something that Something that you know not

1:53:49 a lot of people are saying that in the world today. He thought it was a bad thing, and he's not even a Christian. A whole bunch of so-called Christians mocked him and said Christianity will never go anywhere. You know, God's going to preserve it no matter what. The impetus for this episode is the that begs the question that there can be Christianity without Christians, which is not the case. If there are no more Christians, there is no more Christianity as a faith. They might be sitting in a book on a shelf somewhere, and certainly the faith is eternal and true, but if there's no one to who believes it, who has the Holy Spirit to propagate it? Yes, that is an absolutely true statement. And even though God promises the opposite in places in Scripture, he

1:54:34 doesn't promise it in the sense that the mockers were describing. He promises it in a sense that calls for us to be the salt and light of the earth, to be the men who show up, to say, yes, Christianity is here and here's what it actually means. And so someone responded to him and said to Elon, if you're going into your born again era, we're so here for it. And Elon replied to him and said, I believe in the principles of Christianity, like love thy neighbors, thyself, in in parentheses he summarized, have empathy for all, and turn the other cheek, any parentheses, he said, and the cycle of retribution. And so called Christians doubled down on attacking him. He said two things that were very clear expressions of part of

1:55:19 the Christian faith, and they were howling in rage at the idea that this wasn't a complete creedal statement that had every possible way of describing the Christian faith. Now, what blew me away is that some of the very same vipers who have said that Corey and I are not and cannot be Christian because we do not love our neighbors as ourselves and because we don't turn the other cheek, both of which are false accusations. But the same people who are mocking him for saying that that was Christianity say that Cory and I are not Christian because we fail those tests. So just as a minor illustration, it's an any stool in a bar fight when you're dealing with Satan. He will tell any lie because all he cares about is doing

1:56:01 damage. And this is why proof texting is so monstrous. It's demonic. Because the passage in scripture no longer has anything to do with what God intended it to say. It's just how can I do damage to the enemy I've already determined I want to kill? And so when Elon correctly summarized portions of the Christian faith, rather than agreeing and amplifying and saying, Yes, you're absolutely correct, Christianity is worth fighting for and preserving. A bunch of people who are not Christians, despite the fact that they attend churches and they call themselves Christians, they denounced a man whose support we need. We need someone like Elon to become a Christian. We don't need in the sense that we're lost without him, but

1:56:42 imagine the sort of movement that would begin if men like him were converting. If guys like Rogan and Elon, who are not Christian, who desperately need the gospel as much as anyone and more than most, the simple fact is that we don't have kings anymore. We don't have someone who will convert an entire nation because he rules He rules over it. But we do have guys like Elon and Rogan that hundreds of millions of people look to as examples, for better or worse, usually for worse. If such men were to convert, you know what happened? A whole bunch of people will become Christian. They wouldn't know why, but they would know that the guy that they like and respect did it and they would follow suit.

1:57:19 And guess what? That's enough. Christianity is about believing what God says and obeying him, is about receiving the faith that makes that possible Again, not that we save ourselves, but when we believe God, when we receive the gift of faith, which makes it even possible in the first place to believe, then God gives us everything else. And these men are crying out for it. Elon's crying out for Christianity. He doesn't quite realize it, but that's exactly what that was. He says Christianity is worth fighting for. And Andrew Tate said effectively the same thing. He was out in the streets, I think in Romania, saying, I'm a Muslim, and I'm still disgusted with what happened at the Olympics. You people, you Christians, should not be letting your God be blasphemed

1:58:06 in this fashion. If a god can be blasphemed like that and the believers in that god just shrug, they're not believers at all. And it doesn't imply that you go to war physically necessarily, but it does necessarily mean that you can't just say, eh, whatever, Christianity will survive this blasphemy. You don't find that anywhere in scripture. The reason that we're focusing today on God's action in our lives in secondarily on the action of Satan of demons in the world and in actual manifest appreciable ways is that there are prophecies in scripture of end times that if you don't believe all the other things that we just said, you're not going to believe these things if we see them in our lifetimes.

1:58:51 In Revelation 20, it touches on something that Corey said a few minutes ago. Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain, and he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. This is a prophecy. This was a future prophecy when it was written, saying that what Corey just said was absolutely true. Satan was bound. He was cast down from heaven the moment that Christ died on

1:59:29 the cross. When he said it was finished, Satan fell like a lightning bolt from heaven. He was cast down out of the divine council and he was chained in hell. And the church age expanded for two thousand years. And at some point that is going to end. This prophecy is saying that that is going to end. And see the mockers who said that Elon was a fool for saying that unless there's more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish. This prophecy is part of saying that Elon's not entirely wrong. The church age will at some point come to an end, and Satan will be released. Now, it's my personal belief, and it's much more of a direct belief. I might be wrong, but it's nothing like the thing I

2:00:14 said about angels earlier. I believe that we are in the period when Satan has been unleashed. I believe that he is let off the chain in hell and that he is actively doing things that he was not permitted to do for thousands of years. And I defy anyone to look at what we see in the world and say, no, that can't be true. Can I prove it? No, absolutely not. But if that were the case, if Satan had been loosed from his chains in hell and permitted to again deceive the nations as God prevented during the church age, would it look any differently than it does right now? I don't see how it could be any worse. It's obviously getting worse every day. There's obviously a dark energy that's being poured into the arc of

2:00:55 history in our lifetimes, in this century, in this decade, in this year, this week we are seeing a dark energy that we can measure we can calculate its presence but we cannot pinpoint it unless we look at the supernatural. So it's possible that I'm wrong, but I really don't think so. You know, and like I said, if I'm wrong and it's gonna get a whole lot worse than this on an exponential scale at some future point, Lord have mercy truly on those who see those days. Because what we are seeing, what we are witnessing, is a falling away in the church where most of the people, you know, we did a five-part series at the beginning of this year talking about all the ways in which the current church, all the people

2:01:40 who say they're Christians, are actually actively apostatizing. And then we see this sort of stuff. This is a spiritual battle. It's not just political. It's not just, well, Christianity is the solution to this, and these people need the gospel. Yeah, that's true. But this is a spiritual war. And they are not coming to talk things over. They're coming to kill us. And worldwide, we see Christians being slaughtered, we see them being persecuted, we see them being arrested, we see them being harmed and hounded and despised at every turn. If that's not Satan unleashed, then God preserve us if that does happen in our lifetimes. Because if it's going to be that much worse than this, I don't know what that could possibly look like.

2:02:26 Here's another passage that I want to end with before we end on a happier note. But this is another prophecy in Matthew 24 that clearly has not been fulfilled entirely yet. I'm not gonna get into the fulfillment of prophecy thing again this time, but those of you who are full preterist, I'm sorry, you're just completely full of it. There's no possible way to read passages like this and believe that they've been completely fulfilled. Jesus says, so when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the Prophet Daniel standing in the holy place, let the reader understand. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let the one who is on the house top not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who

2:03:06 is in the field not turn back to take his cloak, and last for the women who are pregnant, and for those who are nursing infants in those days. Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath, for then there will be great tribulation such as not been seen from the beginning of the world until now, no and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no human would be saved, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short. So again, this passage directly refutes the mockery of Elon, who says that Christianity could perish. Matthew 24, Jesus says Christianity would perish if I did not supernaturally intervene and end creation. This is a prophecy from God that things will get so bad

2:03:52 that all of the elect would fall away and cease to be Christian, every last one of us, me, Cory, everyone who's listening, would apostatize because that's how bad things are going to get, unless, through God's mercy, he ends things. So I don't know when that's gonna be. It seems like we're headed that way. Will we see it in our lifetimes? We're gonna find out one way or another. I'm not gonna make a prediction, but I think that the crucial thing is we have to take seriously that these things are real. Whether they're real today or they're real next year or next decade or next century, they will come true, they will be fulfilled. These are prophecies from God. And so when he says these things, he said they're actually going

2:04:35 to be physical, material manifestations of evil such that even the elect would fall away. And then we have people calling themselves Christians scoffing when a pagan like Elon, who's wearing Satan on his chest when he says it says Christianity's gonna perish, and that's a bad thing. We're in deep trouble. And unless we get back to taking seriously the fact that there's both a spiritual and a material, and that they work together in ways according to God's perfect design when these things do occur, whether it's in the present or in the future, when they occur, not if, when. If we have people mocking and scoffing and saying that will never happen, that is itself proof that it is in fact happening.

2:05:20 You cannot say no, there will never be any sort of apostasy when God Himself says the apostasy will come and everyone will fall away if I don't end it, if I don't end the suffering and the horror of those days. The reason for talking about these things and armoring people's minds and their souls is that should those days come upon us, or should they be a thousand years from now, whenever those days come, Christians in those days must be prepared to take these prophecies seriously, to take God seriously, to take God as seriously as Job did, that when the worst thing befell him, he said The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. He didn't cry about Satan. He didn't say it was unfair.

2:06:04 He said God is still in charge, no matter how bad it gets. God promises it's gonna get so bad that even Job would have lost his faith in those circumstances, in future circumstances. And so when we see people like Elon crying out for Christianity without realizing it The last thing any Christian should be doing is mocking him. We should recognize that what we see at the Olympics, what we see in all these other places in these days, where people who are not Christian are saying, hey, Christianity's under attack, and that's bad news. When the unbeliever is saying that, and the believers so-called are mocking and scoffing, the apostasy is among us. Job was one of the books that we could have just read,

2:06:47 large chunks of it for this episode, and it would have reinforced again and again the idea of God's providence, of God's active influence involvement in creation, that he is not the watchmaker who wound up the universe and walked away. Rather, he is both transcendent and imminent. He is involved intimately in his creation. But in addition to Job, we could also have read basically the entirety of the book of Psalms. Yes, there are some Psalms that do not deal with Providence, but many of them do. And so we will end this episode with one psalm in particular, Psalm 104. But before we get to that psalm, I just want to make one last comment with regard to how some Christians today incorrectly view

2:07:46 the world and the ongoing battle between good and evil. What we have happening with regard to some in the church when they abandon the field, because that is the reality of what they're doing, when they simply look to the next life and say that, well, what happens in this life doesn't matter. They're denying the flesh. They're denying the reality of our physical created nature, because man is not just spirit and man is not just body. You are more than either of those. And the sum of them is greater, as we've mentioned before it's a gestalt. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. They're focusing on the spiritual. Many of them actually are heretics in that they deny the resurrection

2:08:39 of the flesh. They focus on some sort of abstract spiritual heaven where you dwell as a spirit for all eternity, which is not what paradise is. There's a new heaven and a new earth. The new earth is paradise. That is what God intends for us, and so you will be resurrected bodily, that is what we confess in the Creed. I believe in the resurrection of the flesh, not just an eternal life. It's an eternal life enfleshed, because that is what a human being is. You are not complete without your body. And so when they deny that this life and the things of this life means Matter. What they're doing is they're denying the reality of what it means to be a human being. They're saying that you're not really flesh, you're a spirit, you're a

2:09:32 ghost operating a meat suit, which is not what you are, and quite frankly that makes them heretics, whether or not that will ultimately damn them is between them and God, but it certainly endangers their faith, it endangers their souls, and endangers their body because of course the suffering in hell is bodily suffering, it is eternal fire, it is not just a suffering of the soul, it is both. But to end on a more positive note with regard to God's providence, with regard to God's active involvement in creation, again being not just transcendent but also imminent. Psalm 104. Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty. Covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens

2:10:28 like a tent. He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters, he makes the clouds his chariot, he rides on the wings of the wind, he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire. He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. he covered it with the deep as with a garment. The waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight, the mountains rose, the valleys sank down, to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth. You make springs gush forth in the valleys, they flow between the hills, they give drink to every beast of the field, the wild

2:11:14 donkeys quench their thirst. Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell. They sing among the branches. From your lofty abode you water the mountains. The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. You cause the grass to grow for the livestock, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man's heart. The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. In them the birds build their nests, the stork has her home in the fir trees, the high mountains are for the wild goats, the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers. He made the moon to mark the seasons, the sun knows its

2:12:00 time for setting, you make darkness and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about, the young lions roar for their prey. Seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens. Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening. O Lord, how manifold are your works, in wisdom have you made them all, the earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you form to play in it. These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are filled with good things.

2:12:49 When you hide your face they are dismayed, when you take away their breath they die, and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live, I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul, praise the Lord. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and will

2:13:42 be forevermore. Amen.