If you have your Bibles with you this morning, please turn to the 40th chapter of the book of Job. The 40th chapter of the book of Job, Job, Psalms, Proverbs. Wisdom chapter of the Bible. And this chapter points to a question this morning that's gonna be on our hearts as we go through this. It's a very deep question and it has, oh, I don't know, by the time we get it answered today, it'll probably be about three o'clock. Hope you guys are not hungry. These guys know me from Poulsboro, by the way. They know that I tend to go a little bit long sometimes. Job chapter 40, let's read verses one through 14. I won't make you stand because I've already seated you. If you want to, that is great. You do that this morning, but you don't have to because I've already seated you. This is the Lord's word. And the Lord said to Job, Shall a fault finder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it. Then Job answered the Lord and said, Behold, I'm of small account. What shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth, I have spoken once, and I will not answer twice, but I will proceed no further. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, Dressed for action like a man, I will question you, and you make it known to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like His? Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity. Clothe yourself with glory and splendor. Pour out the overflowings of your anger and look on everyone who is proud and abase him. Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them all in the dust together. Bind their faces in the world below. Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand is able to save you. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Our gracious Heavenly Fathers, we come before this text this morning. It's awesome. Father, we see through Job's life your majesty. And we want to see you in all your brilliance this morning, Father. We want to know you. We want to know your love, your forgiveness, your mercy, and your justice. Oh, our land cries for justice today. Father, will you be with your people this morning, work in their hearts in the way that only your word can do. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Thank you, beloved. Job chapter 40. I was gonna start in Ephesians, and we're gonna start in Ephesians, but I got to the first line in Ephesians where Paul says he was an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ by the will of God. And all I could think about was the will of God, because in the first part of chapter one of the book of Ephesians, The will of God is mentioned five different times down through there. And I want to know the will of God. I want you to know the will of God. And it is in seeing God. These are base things in the Christian religion is that when we see who God truly is, we know who we truly are. We know where we stand before him. And then if the word is working in our heart through the power of the Holy Spirit, we see our need in Jesus Christ because we can't stand before God. We can't ever stand before God, but through Jesus Christ or in Jesus Christ, we can approach the throne of glory boldly, scripture tells us. So it's through this couple weeks here in chapter 40, 41, and 42, I wanna spend just a little time in Job, seeing God, and in my estimation of all of scripture, Job is asked this answer about, or asked this question about evil this morning, that is a difficult question for us to deal with, the question is why is there evil in the world? Why does it have to exist? Why do people have to get sick? Why does there have to be car wrecks? Tornadoes? Cancer? Why? Why evil in this world? Why the injustice? Why does it exist? And it's through seeing our inability against evil that we can see God more clearly. The proposition that I want to leave you with this morning, The one point that I want to drift through this whole message is to say to you this morning that no one can have mastery over the thing more than the creator of the thing. None can have mastery over the thing more than the creator of the thing. Now, that may not sound like much now, but if you put this in the perspective of we being the creation and that master being God, we see God's mastery over us, and none can have mastery over us like the creator of us. So to illustrate this a little bit, I think about my first computer, and I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't any computers. And my first computer was an 80 megabyte hard drive. How many of you guys remember that? It had a tower, and it said Sears on it. I kid you not. And I was director of engineering for a company in Kansas City, and when I started doing that, I had an 80 megabyte hard drive Sears computer. And when we programmed machinery on that thing, it used floppy disks for goodness sake. There wasn't any Bluetooth. There wasn't any streaming. There wasn't a stream to stream anything on at that time, okay? Everything was hardwired. It was an 80-megabyte hard drive. Jeez, you can't even take a good selfie with an 80-megabyte picture today, right? So it's quite different the times between now and then. And when we programmed things, we did so On the disk system itself, it was called DOS, or Disk Operating System, and Blake remembers that. He's about my age, probably, and he remembers that, and it was quite complicated to program in DOS. Then, not too long after that, came out a program that you're familiar with, called Windows. And there was, listen to me, this is like a minivan. Nobody in 1982 was going, man, I wish there was a station wagon that was halfway in between a station wagon and a full-size van called a minivan. That's called a paradigm situation. Nobody was asking for something like that. But whenever they were created by Lee Iacocca, everybody had to have a minivan. They still got them. I don't know why. I would never own one of those things. But they're everywhere. So it was like that with Windows. Nobody knew what Windows was, right? And, well, we all do today, and I think it's probably a source of cursing for some of us, but we had to totally rely. We could play around in Windows a little bit, and you could kind of get a feel for it. You know, the Bible calls that feeling your way around in the dark, and we kind of had an idea what to do, but we had to rely on the people that engineered the program Windows. They created it. They had mastery over it. They knew exactly what that program could do, and what it couldn't do. So it holds true that none can have mastery over the thing more than the creator of the thing. Now, we all got pretty good on Windows, but none of us know why it crashes so much, right? Why do we have to restart it so often? But the creator of the thing has an intimate involvement with the thing. And I want you to know that that works not only in inanimate objects like computers, but much more so in human objects like us. Obviously it's man that we're talking about here this morning. And when we read this passage in Job, here we have Job, one of the first men ever to begin to argue with God. And just think about that with me for just, just think of the futility of that with me just momentarily. God, the one that has mastery over everything because he's created everything that exists. And you say, well, pastor, did he create windows? Well, by proxy he did because not only did he create Bill Gates, right? He knit him together in his mother's womb, Psalms 139. I don't know what happened after that, but we'll leave that for another time. And then. And then he created all the resources that the creature makes all the creations out of, right? God did that. We dig in the ground, we get rocks, we smelt the ore, we have steel. All of that, God, by proxy, even created the computer. Why would we argue with a creature like this? He's created everything in the past, here in the present. and everything in the future, things that we know about and understand and things we've not even yet discovered, then maybe don't even know that they exist. God's created all those things. Who would ever argue with this being, this creator of all that exists? God, who would do that? And the answer is we all have. You all have, I have, we all have. But the biblical answer to that this morning is twofold. First, and we're gonna dispense with this quickly, is the biblical fool. The fool. A biblical fool has nothing to do with intellectual capacity or ability, like we use the word fool today. A biblical fool outright denies God. Blake read it there this morning in some of the scripture. He outright denies God, so it's a moral judgment on the biblical fool. Psalms 14.1 says, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. That's the most foolish thing. That's more foolish than arguing with the God that does exist. So if the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, I hope you can see the outcome of the fool. This is the outworking of practical atheism. He outright denies what obviously exists. I don't know why you would have to declare to not believe in something that doesn't exist, but that's what atheists do. It's the most untenable position, in my opinion, out there. So that's the first. the biblical fool. The second more important we want to spend more time with is us, right? Man and his ignorance about who God truly is. He just doesn't know. He may be searching. This is a much larger category of people in our world today. Good men and women have wrestled with the truths that Job is wrestling with this morning, and I'm assured that each one of you have probably wrestled with these things. These are base principles, base questions that we call metaphysical principles, of questions that we all ask. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? You ever ask those questions? I don't know, maybe you're perfect. Do you ever ask those questions? We all ask those questions. Aristotle's one of the famous men that did. 350 years before Christ, in his little work called Metaphysics, you find this. This is the very first line. All men naturally desire knowledge. They want to know who they are, why they're here, and what their purpose is. The great thinkers throughout history, Augustine, if we jump to the fourth century, writes in Confessions, this is a little bit sweeter. Augustine was more of a romantic. He was a great writer. He's one of my favorite. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. I like that. Skip ahead to the 16th century reformer, John Calvin. He put it more directly and probably more helpful for our work here this morning. He said, nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Calvin would go on to say, we can't have any knowledge of God until we know who we are, and we can't have any knowledge of who we are until we know who God is. And then to me, that creates an interesting dilemma. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? How do we know God if we don't know who we are? And how can we know who we are if we don't know who God is? Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts. I'm going to relieve that for you today. So why does man argue with God? Why did Job argue with God? Because knowing God and knowing him rightly means to fear God or respect who he is. It's a simple answer, really. The obvious answer is they don't know who he truly is. He adds this element to help us understand why the world looks like it does. Really, it's just a corollary of our earlier proposition, our earlier statement. None can have mastery over the thing more than the creator of the thing, but if one wants to know the thing, that is, that which is created, he must know the creator. You see how that works, guys? Do you see how that works? So the moral of this story is if you don't know who God is, you don't know who you are, you don't know what your purpose is, you don't know the meaning of life, you don't know why you're here, and you don't know what you're here for. You're just kind of bumping around. How many people do you know like that? Huh? How many people do you know like that? And do you remember when you were that person before you were saved? Because that's the missing link here. I'm gonna give it away just a little bit earlier. We can begin to know who God is once we see who we are enough to know our need in Jesus Christ to turn to God truly. and feared him. That's what Calvin was getting after. And to me, that's the most, that's why I read these guys, these old dead guys and girls, is because I want to have a better understanding of the struggle they had. Even Job is struggling with the very same things as he's going through the misery in his life, as he's going through the testing in his life. He is struggling with these same things. If we don't know who God is, it's kind of like trying to use Windows operating system without tech support. Can you tell I don't like Windows? They've probably made it better by now, but I'm not going to try. But this is exactly why our world looks like it does. Beloved, let me just warn you of this from the preacher to the ears of the sheep, is that if we continue down this path with transgenderism and the things that our culture is teaching today, chemically castrating little boys and mutilating little girls that in 15 years there's going to be suicides like we've never seen in our life before. Because they're going to wake up one day and they are going to be so sad about the reality that they thought was. This answers the question, why would man ever contend with God? What is the reason one would ever contend with God? Because they just don't know who he is. Because they have no respect for who he is or any sense of the absolute all for what he has done. They don't understand his power, his holiness. and his sovereignty. We're gonna open that up a little bit more because I wanna just, well, let's just do it now. If God is holy, that means that he's righteous. You know what, these are big words, but they're not scary words. What does righteous mean? If you're righteous, it means everything you do is right. And if everything you do is right, it has to be good. God doesn't make any mistakes. Why would you argue with this being? He's holy, he's righteous, he's good. All of his attributes of perfection flow from holiness. And this is where we find Job this morning. Job has spent the chapters leading up to this point questioning God about these things. Why are you making me suffer? His bigger question, if you really get into the book of Job, is why don't you punish the ones that do suffer justly? We know that Job was a good man. God said that from the beginning of the word. He said that Job was a good man and Job was not seemingly suffering for any one sin. Yet all around Job he could see people who were doing injustices, not suffering. That's his greater question to God. That's the argument that he's making with God. But in Job doing that, God is going to ask Job and conversely us this morning, you beloved, a question that none of us have the answer for. So Job begins in Job chapter 40. Verse one, and the Lord said to Job, shall a fault finder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it. Just think about those words for a minute. In the Hebrew, that fault finder, reprover, is yisor. It means a corrector, a man who argues a case, and it has to do with the law. In other words, he's got weighty facts, and the law is gonna prove him right. One that reproves or argues, yikaz, It's just a movement, a connotation on that word. It implies the fact that the one is doing the reproving or the rebuking or the arguing, that there is a correct way, number one. That number two, that the person being spoken to can be corrected and that that person will accept that correction and go the right direction once he's been corrected. Mind you, Job is talking to God. You ever done that? You ever talk to God like that? You ever ask him why? Let me just warn you here, if you try to do what Job did to correct God, you're gonna come out on the short end of that stick every go around. I would tell you it would be kind of like arguing with my wife. She's not here to defend herself, so I won't say it out loud. Everything declares the glory of God. And what we need to go back just a little bit here and catch, if you just turn in your Bibles, you see chapters 38 and 39, well this set a little context here, because God is doing what he does all throughout the Psalms, all throughout scriptures and what we need to know this morning. God is asking Job a question by pointing to things that he's created. The created order speaks of who God is, right? And if you just like, if you start at 38, chapter 38, verse one, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and he said, who is it that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. And this is kind of the repeating theme. God says, dress for action like a man. In other words, get ready, Job. Verse four, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you must know. Or who stretched the line upon it? Or what were its bases sunk on? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sing together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? You see, God's pointing to creation. The 39th chapter, you see exactly the same thing. 39 one, do you know when the mountain goats give birth, Job? Do you observe the calving of the does? Can you number the months that they fulfill? Do you know this, do you know that? Verse five, who has let the wild donkey go free? Verse 10, can you bind him in the furrow with ropes? On and on, God is querying Job about creation. And creation is one of the greatest things to explain to us how great God is. Delaware Memorial Bridge yesterday. I had to run down to a little town south of here and pick up some fresh bread for the Lord's table. And just going over there, I know it's commonplace probably to all you all, but that bridge is awesome, man. And then I went across the Bay Bridge and a little further south. And those things are awesome. Man has done some great things. And we've done some great things with nature. I mean, listen, we've put rovers on Mars. We've been to the moon. We have got electronic arms that function like a real arm. I mean, we've done some amazing things with creation. So it may be okay for man to argue a little bit with God through creation, but when we think about the way God puts it here to Job, we know that we don't have these powers. These declare the power of God and the glory of God. Psalms 19 says it thusly, The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day it pours out speech and night into night it reveals knowledge. There's no speech, listen, this knowledge of what creation is, that there is a creator and that it sends out that spark goes everywhere. There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. And I'll remind you, natural creation is perfectly obeying God still today. The oak tree's never going to argue with God like a human being will argue with God. It's still giving God all the glory due his name. It's us that argue with God. Can boys be girls? Can men marry men? You ever heard, never heard a tree argue with God? So God gives Job just a little glimpse of who he is through nature. He gives him just a little glimpse of God's splendid, effulgent glory. That's the glory of God that's undiminishable no matter how ignorant we are. It's the Shekinah glory of God that fills the heaven and one day will fill the new heavens and the new earth and there won't be a need for the sun. It's God's glory that's ever there. It's for us to recognize. And it leaves him mute. Job can't say a word, and this is the pattern of all of scripture when they come into the presence of the living God. Isaiah, Daniel, John, pick anyone that has been into the presence of God. Most of them are driven to their knees, and they know how undone they are, how unholy they are, because His holiness has no equal. Psalms 33, six through nine say these words. By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth, all their host. He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap. He puts the deep into the storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him, for he spoke, it came to be, he commanded, and it stood firm. Philippians 2 will remind us that at one day, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess to the glory of God the Father, Jesus Christ as Lord. Isaiah 46, verses eight through 10. really 8 through 11 since we've got plenty of time left on our three hour clock. Remember this and stand firm. Recall it to your minds, you sinners. Remember the former things of old, for I am God, there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. I declare the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that have not even yet happened, saying, my counsel shall stand and I will accomplish all my purpose. calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass. I have purposed, and I will do it." That gets to the question from Ephesians 1 of God's will. Nothing's going to stop God's holy will. Nothing's going to stop him from bringing all of this to pass. So when God gave Job just a little glimpse of his glory, we see what happened to Job. It's instantaneously humbling. And that has a reciprocal effect on human beings. And the amount by which we encounter or know God is directly proportionate to our understanding of our sinfulness before him. We see that as Job answers God. He says, then Job answered the Lord. Verse three of the passage that we're using this morning. Then Job answered the Lord and he said, behold, I'm a small account. What could I ever answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once and I will not answer twice, but I will go no further with you. There was no argument that Job could have made before God about his suffering and why God was doing the things in Job's life that he was doing. As our knowledge of God expands, our image of our own self-confidence decreases. As our knowledge, and that's what the word there, Job says in verse four, I'm a small account. It's an important word. As our knowledge of God expands, our image of ourself and our self-confidence must diminish. John the Baptist said it like this in John 3.30, he must increase, but I must decrease. God heard all of Job's questions through his entire ordeal and all of his suffering, and he knew Job intimately. He knew Job's heart and the parts that Job would never have said out loud about all of his trials. And I want you to know this morning that he knows your trials. He knows the depths of your heart. He knows every bad thought you've had, every bad thing you've done, and he still sent his son to die on the cross of Calvary because he loves you. And he loved Job. Listen to me. God allows evil to take place in our lives because he wants us to see who he is. And in seeing who he is, we know who we are and what we need in Jesus Christ. God heard everything Job has said. And Job says, behold, I'm small account. I love this word. I love the words in the Hebrew. They mean so much. We could spend a lot of time on this, but basically what it meant was, I'm small and I'm decreasing in status as I encounter you. I'm small, I have no power compared to you, and I'm decreasing in status compared to you. Becoming increasingly less confident, Job was. What was Job losing his confidence in? His ability to reprove and argue with God. See, man makes the mistake of making himself the standard in these arguments. God says he's the standard, and we say, when we judge and begin to question God, we've made ourselves the standard. Man makes the mistake of making himself the standard. We're good, and we are, compared to someone worse than us, but the standard for good is not that we are better than someone else worse than us. The standard for good is God's perfect righteousness. The Reformation brought that out in the 15th century. In fact, that's what the word means. The motto of the Reformation was Semper Reformata, always reforming. And it's a little continuum that I like to teach folks about. The more we learn about God, if you'll see that on an upward sloping continuum, because we start down here where the two points meet on the continuum, and this is where we find the cross, and we're saved, okay? And we begin to understand who God is because we're empowered by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit teaches us what God's word says. And we begin to get a higher and higher and higher understanding of God. But as we get a higher understanding of God, like Job did, our understanding of ourself is on a downward continuum. But when we judge ourselves by ourselves, we're pointing to worse behavior to judge and justify our bad behavior. I can always find somebody who's doing worse than me, can't you? That's the argument you're making with God, and it's a futile argument. And if everybody's pointing down, look at what direction everybody's heading. How does that look like our culture today? The goal's here. If sin is missing the mark, the mark is here. We're not perfect. We're going to shoot some arrows around it. But we're reforming. We're heading that direction, semper reformata. We're always pointing upward to God, and that's what reform is. Pointing downward to worse behavior is an attempt to just justify our bad behavior. Job's only answer, we see it there in verses four and five, is to cover his mouth. And then God has him, man. Then God really brings the heat here. And this is where it gets interesting, where we'll spend the other two hours, is that God asked Job this question about evil. God's gonna ask Job this question, and conversely, through Job, in this writing, he's asking us. He said something about nature earlier, and I think we can kinda handle that a little bit better, but when we really, truly, and rightly think about evil, we're undone. We have no answer for evil. We think we do. You see him on TV screaming, justice, justice. Make more laws. Well, what happens when people break the laws? Because there are lawbreakers in their hearts. They don't follow the laws. Well, we'll put them in prison. But there's more lawbreakers coming along. And by the way, whenever there's more lawbreakers, there's never any real justice. We're not putting people in prison. We're defunding police. This is what happened when man argues with God and doesn't look at his perfect righteousness in this. Now, don't get me wrong, beloved. I am not saying today that we shouldn't try for justice in our place. But what I am saying is the answer to evil is not found in man's laws, it's found in man's hearts. When we know who God is, and we know who we are, we understand the punishment for evil. Read with me in verse six there, we're gonna work through the last part of this pretty quickly. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, dress for action like a man. There's our impediment again. And all the time we see these 16-year-olds, and I love 16-year-olds. I love it when they have passion for things. But you see them screeching at the top of their lungs on something, and you know that they don't have any experience about what they're talking about. They're just repeating what's been said. That's what I think about when I read dress for an action like man. Man is just repeating what he thinks is right to God, who's holy, righteous, and good. Dress for action like a man, Joe. I'm about to reprove you. I'm about to argue something with you, and we'll see if you have answers. I will question you, and you make it known to me. Will you put me in the wrong? Can you condemn me that you may be right? And really, he's just undoing what came earlier. Joe came in as the fault finder, remember? He was gonna reprove God. Again, that word fault finder means that there is a correction that needs to be made. You're speaking with somebody that can accept that correction and be corrected and go the correct way. But in this case it was God. He's undoing that here. Verse nine, do you have an arm like God? Here he's starting to say something different. We've got nature in the last two chapters, but then we've got this question about evil that's coming. Do you have an arm like God? And anytime you see that in scripture, it's about God's power. And that's what he says. Can you thunder with a voice like his? In other words, can you say, let there be light and the sun would exist? That would be a good one that I would use on Job. Can you separate the waters from the waters? Can you say to the sea, stop right there and go no further? See, these are the natural questions that he came with earlier, but he's getting ready to change it here. Verse 10 begins like this. Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity. And here's where God ties majesty, dignity, sovereignty, power, holiness, righteousness, goodness. Everything that he has done is right and good, and that means that he deserves the glory for it. That means he's majestic, that he has dignity, and he wants Job to know that I am the one I am? Come on, Job, clothe yourself with glory and splendor. Or let me replace Job's name with Bill's or John's. or Julie's or Jane's. Close yourself with splendor. Go ahead and pour out your anger and look on everyone who's proud and abase them. Uh-oh, we're in trouble here. As my son Malik likes to, he gets me every time on this. Him and my wife, I'm telling you, they're in coots together. I know they're watching. You see, whenever I discipline my son, I'm going after it. You give me that phone. You're not going to football practice. You're going to do all the chores twice. You're going to clean this, mow that, do this, all those things. Man, I'm just spitting. My wife's in the background going, well, Mr. Raymer, you need to remember when you were 15 and you did those things, right? And all of a sudden, my justice just melts into nothing because I had to remember that I did all those same things. And my justice to my son and to everybody I meet, for that matter, becomes tainted by my own evil, my own wrongs. Beloved, God's never done anything wrong. On the day of judgment, he's not going to grade on curve like I do. That's what he's saying here. Is your anger fit for this work? Can you debase the proud? Verse 12, look on everyone who is proud, bring them down low and tread down the wicked where they stand. Intimately we know that the wicked's within us when we start to do this. The whole society says this to us, don't judge. Don't judge. We feel that, don't we? That's what God's bringing out here. And asking the question about evil, he's just reminding Job that he's a sinner like everyone else. Verse 13, hide them down in the dust together, bind their faces. In other words, pass out perfect justice. Verse 14's the capstone here. Then he says, I will also acknowledge to you, if you can do this, that you're able to save yourself. Intimately, we know that we can't do that because we know ourself pretty well. We know the depths of our own heart. So the greatest knowledge of God that we can have is saving knowledge. Job understood two things, and God's teaching Job this through allowing him to suffer, because I'm telling you that if we all had the life that we wish we had, nobody would ever turn to God. We'd all think we had the power to do everything we needed to, everything we could place where we needed to. We can judge everybody that needs to be judged. We can take care of everything we need to. No, we're helpless, weak individuals ultimately, especially in the face of evil. God is sovereign over the evil in the world. And God is sovereign over the evil in your heart. COVID-19, unjust lockdowns, churches closed, threats to religious freedom, election fraud, rampant rioting, civil unrest, police defunding, false profits of social justice, gender confusion, sexual degeneracy, cancel culture, fake news. You heard those words before? We're all living in these dark days, aren't we? And there's every indication that things are going to get worse before they get better. And adding to all these societal ills, many are experiencing increased personal problems, broken marriages, wayward children, lost jobs, financial failures, fatal illnesses. Fear and uncertainty are always on the rise in our world. Anxiety permeates the air we breathe. If our society had any notion about the inherent goodness of man, those notions should be gone by now. Invoking the world, evil is no longer regarded as naive or misguided. Like the many heads of Hydra, evil is rising in multiple directions today, and everyone is on edge, including even faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Scott Christensen wrote that. He wrote a little book called Understanding Evil. He wrote that little paragraph in a recent article, and I thought it was very pert to what we needed to hear this morning. Evil's all around us. It always has been. It was there in Job's day, and it's there today, and it will be until Christ returns. We intimately know we have no answer for evil, and we intimately know that we've played a part. So what's the answer, preacher? Get to it, right? Because God took the greatest evil ever committed by man and used it for the greatest good ever given to man. That's the answer for evil. God took the greatest evil ever committed by man and used it for the good, greatest good ever given to man. Let me read you from Acts 2, 22 through 24. Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst as you know yourselves. This Jesus you delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. You crucified him and killed him by the hands of lawless men. That is the greatest evil that has ever been done by man that God turned from the greatest evil to the greatest good ever given to man. Jesus Christ. It's the cross, beloved. It's in the cross is the answer for evil. It's in the cross we have the answer for knowing God. It's in the cross we have the answer for knowing ourselves. Beloved, death and hell and the grave and all evil was defeated in one foul swoop there at Calvary that day. It was a plan before the foundation of the world. And in it, you see the justice, the cost of your evil, the cost of all evil, but you also see God's love, mercy, and forgiveness. He gives you hope and life through what you see on the cross. God killed his son so that he could solve evil for you. And did you see God's sovereignty in it? Let me take just a moment, just one more moment to explain that. Men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst. Remember when Jesus walked the earth? One of the greatest questions I always had as a little boy was, how could Judas see him do all those things and still do what he did? You see the sovereignty of God? Jesus healed everyone. There was no question that Jesus was sinless. and we want to solve evil with laws? They took a sinless man who did nothing but good for everybody and they killed him. Does that show you how the human heart is evil? Those men in the first century were doing what they most desired that day and they were killing Jesus on that cross. They were jealous, they wanted to keep their position of power, they wanted to keep everything they had. And they killed him on the cross. Yet this was the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, this Jesus who you delivered up. God took the greatest evil ever committed by man and gave to man the greatest good ever given to man. You will either trust in God's provision for your evil or your own. Don't argue. Don't be the fool. There is no God other than the God we serve, the God of scripture. Beloved, here's my promise. The cross is the answer to all your questions. The cross is the answer to all your questions, your sin, your evil, your restlessness. The cross is how you know God through a relationship and Jesus Christ, and conversely, how you will ever know yourself. Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, all those men, great men, great men and women throughout the centuries, even Job this morning, tells us that they've all wrestled with this great question. If you want to know the one who created you, look at the cross. I'll leave you with one verse this morning. before we move to communion. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for the good for those who are called according to his purpose. Even evil. Gracious Heavenly Fathers, we come to a close this morning. I just pray that you work in the hearts of your beloved people. Father, give them the bread of life through the word of life. Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Your word is life. Precious life to us, Father. As a young 13-year-old boy told me Friday afternoon, he said, I want to read my Bible so I don't sin against my God. That's it. That's all we need. If we don't sin against you, Father, we're not going to sin against our brothers and our sisters. Do that work in us, Father. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen. Now I'm going to ask the men to come forward.