Personal Comfort in God’s Sovereignty Over Evil

00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, assuming someone is persuaded by the previous podcast, in

00:00:09.600 | episode 104, that God can will that sin be without himself sinning, how does that

00:00:16.680 | conviction then bring comfort to a Christian?

00:00:20.000 | The truth of God's sovereignty over sin, my sin, the world's sin, and over all the

00:00:29.720 | evil in the world, creates a problem for some people. In the end, for those who rest in

00:00:38.200 | it, see it in the Bible, believe that God is their Father through Jesus Christ, for

00:00:45.200 | them, for me, we find this doctrine to be of enormous comfort, enormous helpfulness

00:00:56.720 | in the face of the worst things in the world, because, a couple of reasons. If he's not

00:01:04.680 | there and things are happening random, then we are the victim of meaninglessness to the

00:01:14.520 | core of all things. And I know there are people who would rather live with that than live

00:01:19.920 | with a God of purposefulness, but I wouldn't. I believe that far deeper hope is given to

00:01:28.560 | those who've lost loved ones and to those who are struck down with some terrible calamity.

00:01:35.800 | Far deeper hope is given to say, "This was not meaningless. This will prove to do something

00:01:43.960 | beyond all your imagination for your good if you will trust the living God and receive

00:01:51.120 | his Son as your Lord and Savior." That's the first thing. The second thing is, just in

00:01:57.440 | principle, if God is so weak or so evil or so foolish that he cannot cause an earthquake

00:02:11.840 | not to happen or a plane not to fly into the side of a building, then his weakness or his

00:02:20.040 | ignorance or his malevolence will never be a comfort to me in all the challenges that

00:02:28.580 | I face in life. In other words, by getting God off the hook of causality, we hang ourselves

00:02:37.920 | on helplessness. And so I think if people will stay with this God, meditate long and

00:02:46.920 | hard, see his face in the face of Jesus Christ, loving them and dying for them, they will

00:02:53.360 | in the end find that his sovereignty is one of the sweetest comforts they have ever known.

00:03:00.040 | Thank you, Pastor John. And for more of Pastor John's personal testimony to the comfort of

00:03:04.560 | God's sovereignty in the midst of personal trials, see his book, The Pleasures of God,

00:03:09.160 | chapter 2, and especially the final subsection on pages 58 and 59 of the 2012 edition. At

00:03:15.520 | DesiringGod.org, you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm

00:03:19.520 | your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:03:21.780 | 1. The Pleasures of God. Or, as John Piper put it, "The Pleasures of God." I'm not sure. I'm just saying.

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