God’s Sovereignty over Evil in My Life

00:00:04.000 | Pastor John, assuming that someone is persuaded by the last podcast, in episode 204,

00:00:09.000 | that God can will that sin be without Himself sinning,

00:00:13.000 | how does such a conviction bring comfort to the Christian life?

00:00:17.000 | The truth of God's sovereignty over sin,

00:00:23.000 | my sin, the world's sin, and over all the evil in the world,

00:00:28.000 | creates a problem for some people.

00:00:32.000 | In the end, for those who rest in it, see it in the Bible,

00:00:37.000 | believe that God is their Father through Jesus Christ,

00:00:42.000 | for them, for me, we find this doctrine to be of enormous comfort,

00:00:51.000 | enormous helpfulness in the face of the worst things in the world

00:00:57.000 | because a couple of reasons.

00:01:00.000 | If He's not there, and things are happening random,

00:01:06.000 | then we are the victim of meaninglessness to the core of all things.

00:01:13.000 | And I know there are people who would rather live with that

00:01:16.000 | than live with a God of purposefulness, but I wouldn't.

00:01:20.000 | I believe that far deeper hope is given to those who've lost loved ones

00:01:27.000 | and to those who are struck down with some terrible calamity.

00:01:32.000 | Far deeper hope is given to say, "This was not meaningless.

00:01:37.000 | This will prove to do something beyond all your imagination for your good

00:01:44.000 | if you will trust the living God and receive His Son as your Lord and Savior."

00:01:51.000 | That's the first thing.

00:01:52.000 | The second thing is, just in principle, if God is so weak or so evil or so foolish

00:02:04.000 | that He cannot cause an earthquake not to happen

00:02:10.000 | or a plane not to fly into the side of a building,

00:02:14.000 | then His weakness or His ignorance or His malevolence

00:02:20.000 | will never be a comfort to me in all the challenges that I face in life.

00:02:27.000 | In other words, by getting God off the hook of causality,

00:02:33.000 | we hang ourselves on helplessness.

00:02:36.000 | And so I think if people will stay with this God, meditate long and hard,

00:02:44.000 | see His face in the face of Jesus Christ, loving them and dying for them,

00:02:49.000 | they will in the end find that His sovereignty is one of the sweetest comforts they have ever known.

00:02:57.000 | Yes. Thank you, Pastor John.

00:02:58.000 | And from Warren, "John Piper's personal testimony of comfort,

00:03:01.000 | of God's sovereignty in his life in the midst of one of his darkest personal trials."

00:03:04.000 | See his book, "The Pleasures of God," chapter 2,

00:03:07.000 | and especially that final subsection on pages 58 and 59 of the 2012 edition of that book.

00:03:12.000 | Again, the book is "The Pleasures of God."

00:03:14.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

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