All right, our scripture lesson is Isaiah chapter 45, and if you're using the Pew Bibles, you'll find that on page 516. We're going to turn to a couple of passages this morning, but I'll read the first seven verses. This is what the Lord says to His anointed. to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of, to subdue nations before him, and to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him, so that gates will not be shut. I will go before you and will level the mountains, I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. For the sake of Jacob my servant, of Israel my chosen, I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of honor, though you do not acknowledge me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. Apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord, and there is none other. I form the light, and create darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things." May God add His blessing to the reading and the preaching of His Holy Word. May we pray. Lord, please help me. All is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One comes down. Would You speak through me, would You anoint me and fill me with Your Spirit, that I may open my mouth boldly and open the Scriptures, Lord, because it's only the preaching of the Bible that does people good. But Lord, that only does people good with the anointing of Your Spirit. And so by Your Word, and by your Spirit create life here. Breathe life in this place, that this building may once again be a building where people flock to hear the gospel, the good news, and where people's lives are changed through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. This is an amazing passage of scripture. I think about this scripture as I was reading it in Hebrew. The word that we have translated Cyrus is a word in Hebrew that is Koresh. Now if you think back to history some time ago, there was a crazy man by the name of Koresh, David Koresh. That was the guy that set up a cult in Waco. He was a Seventh-day Adventist. Let that sink in for a moment. And then he began to disciple a group of those Seventh-day Adventists who began to be fascinated with his teachings and his prophecies about the future. Everybody always wants to know the future. That's why people go to fortune tellers, why they read horoscopes. They want to know secret knowledge and get information nobody else has. They want to know what's going to happen tomorrow. But the basic message of the Bible is, I can say, I don't know what tomorrow holds or what the future holds, but I know who holds the future. And that's the theme of this passage. And so Cyrus in Hebrew is Koresh, and it just reminded me of a man who wanted to give people secret knowledge, and so he set up a cult. that he called Mount Carmel. And you know the disaster of that. Cults are always amazing. And it's amazing how people get sucked into cults, and into David Koresh's cult. But that's not who Cyrus is. Cyrus is here called the Lord's Anointed. It's the only time in Scripture that a pagan king is called the Anointed One. He is a Messiah, if you will. Messiah simply means an anointed one. He is a Christ, though He's not the Christ, the anointed one. He is somebody that God has raised up to do a special purpose. And what is that? Well, the special purpose is to free the Jewish people from captivity in Babylon. And this is what happens. In the year 539 BC, Cyrus the Persian conquers the city of Babylon. You can read about it in the book of Daniel. In Babylon they thought they were safe and secure from all alarms, because they had a plentiful water supply, and they had a massive gate that allowed the water to come through, and they could get all of the water, and they had all of the food they needed, and they were not worried about enemy armies. So the enemy armies are around them, led by Cyrus. There has become at this point a union between the Medes and the Persians to provide a great army. And so what happens is that an army oftentimes is victorious because of its core of engineers. And so Cyrus arranged for his core of engineers to divert the water of the river And so that Babylon is then such that the armies can walk in and invade the city without going through the gate. They just go in and they capture the city. And you know that story in Daniel 5, the handwriting on the wall? And that's when Daniel prophesies to Belteshazzar this very night, you know, the city is going to fall. And that king was killed that night, and Daniel survives and serves the next empire. Now, the fascinating thing about this, before I get too far into the passage, is that Isaiah prophesied this. And Isaiah is living during the time of the Assyrian Empire. And so we know that this prophecy comes about somewhere around or before 700 BC. So think about it for a moment. 700 BC, ballpark figure. You're looking at something that's prophesied 160 years roughly before it happens. And this is an amazing example of predictive prophecy. God not only prophesies that Israel is going to suffer exile, But he prophesies they're going to be restored out of that exile. And he names the very king that he is going to raise up as his Messiah, not the ultimate Messiah, as his Messiah to lead the people of God out of Babylonian captivity to come back to Jerusalem. And he says his name is Cyrus. Now it's interesting that the only accurate historian of the Jewish people in the first century of the Christian era, Josephus, tells us that Cyrus was shown this prophecy that occurred before He came. In other words, this prophecy is given roughly a century and a half before Him, and He is informed that the God of Israel has named Him by name and said that He is going to restore the Jewish people to their homeland. And that that influenced Him in deciding to push make possible the restoration of the Jewish people. So, this prophecy is very significant. It's how God engineered a pagan king to be His anointed, His King Cyrus. So, here's what happens. Assyria is very powerful in Isaiah's time. Assyria eventually becomes very weak and in the place of Assyria rises the Babylonian Empire and the Babylonians conquer the Holy Land and they lead the Jewish people into captivity and they destroy the Jewish Temple and then the Jewish Temple is rebuilt. under the Persians. And of all the ancient empires that the Israelites dealt with, the Persians were the kindest. They were the gentlest with them. And perhaps it is because of this prophecy. So notice the things that he tells him. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. I'm going to strip kings, he says there in verse 1, to subdue nations before him, to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut. You see all those things and how they're true in reality. When Babylon falls and the riches of Babylon come to the Persians, they were a great wealthy empire. And then he says something else. He tells him that he's doing all this in verse 4, for the sake of Jacob his servant, of Israel his chosen, and that's why he summons Cyrus by name and bestows on Cyrus a title of honor, even though Cyrus did not acknowledge him. And he goes on, and this is what he says, and this is the critical part of the text, verse 5, I am the Lord and there is no other. Apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting, men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things." Now, this is very critical. Because the Persians believed in a dualistic universe. They believed in two co-equal co-eternal forces. We may call them gods. They believed in a good god and a bad god, in a god who created all the good things and another god who created all the bad things. Light came from the good god. That good god's name was Ahura Mazda. He comes to be known as Ahura Mazda. And eventually, in the history of Persian religion, which forms the basis of Zoroastrianism, the bad god is called Angra Maya. You can remember it this way. He's the bad god, angry. So, Angra Maya, the bad god, Ahura Mazda, the good god. And so, they're equally balanced between one another. Good, evil. Darkness, light, and so on. Prosperity, chaos and trouble, misery. And so the Persians had an answer for why there's trouble in the world. Why is there trouble? Why is there cancer? Why is there heart disease? Why is there divorce? Why is there war? Why do people die? And the answer of the Persians was, that's the bad guy. He's engineered all that stuff. And so, we worship the good God, Ahura Mazda. The good God gives light. He gives health. He gives prosperity. And it's interesting as you look at this, in verse 7, I form the light and create darkness. The God of Israel is saying to Cyrus the Persian, who believed in two gods, there's only one God. And everything that happens is under my control. He says, I form the light. and create darkness. I the Lord do all these things. I bring prosperity. It's interesting the word translated prosperity is the Hebrew word shalom, which you've heard I'm sure many times. The Arabs say shalom aleichem, the Jews say shalom. And what does shalom mean? Shalom is not just a greeting like peace man. Shalom means health. Shalom means wealth. Shalom means harmony. It means people getting along with each other. It means blessing. So when you say, with the Hebrew tongue, shalom, you're really wishing somebody not only the absence of war, but all the blessings of life. And so the true God says, I bring shalom, but I also create rah. And that's an interesting thing, isn't it? He says, I create raw, evil, disaster. So it's amazing that the God of the Bible, the God of the Bible who inspired the prophet Isaiah a century and a half before Cyrus to name this man by name and tell him, this is what you're going to do. You're going to free my people. He told him that. He said, they're not two gods, there's only one. Now I want us to look at a couple of places of Scripture. The first one I want us to look at is Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1 over to the right. And in Ephesians chapter 1, if we're using a pew Bible, we'll find this on page, let's see, 800 and 827. And this is what we're told in verse 11. Paul writing to Christians and he says, "...in Him, that is, in Christ, we were chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will." That's a powerful statement, isn't it? God works out everything He says, everything in accordance, He says, according to the purpose of His will, in conformity with the purpose of His will. You know, Jesus said that we shouldn't worry in life. He says, aren't two spares sold for a penny? And yet not one of them does what? Falls to the ground apart from your heavenly Father. Ever thought about that? You ride along the road, you see plenty of places where birds fall, where they've been run over, where they've been killed, they've been hit by a car. One may fall in the backyard. He says, not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from your heavenly Father. And then He says this, and the very hairs of your head are numbered by Him. So Jesus gives us an absolute knowledge of God. I should say, Jesus gives us a knowledge of a God who is in control of the world absolutely. But, and here's the great but, turn with me back to the book of Genesis and chapter 50, the last chapter of the book of Genesis, and Genesis chapter 50, and we're going to look at verse 20. Genesis 50, verse 20. As we think about it, God and evil, and that's page 40. Genesis 50, verse 20. Excuse me. Yeah, that's it. Getting it in context, verse 18, his brothers then came and threw themselves down before him. We're your slaves, they said. These are Joseph's brothers. Now think about it. If you were Joseph and you were the second in command of the entire Egyptian empire, which was at that time the most powerful empire in the world, and your brothers had treated you the way his brothers had treated him, You would have probably turned them over to the torturers. Because what did they do? They sold him into slavery. Think about it. They sold him into slavery. And think of all the terrible things that happened to him when he was a slave. He's doing his best. He's being conscientious. He's working hard. And he goes to work for a high up in the Egyptian empire. And what happens? That man's wife sets her desires on him. and she's trying to lay a trap for him and Joseph slips away from her and then she screams, And he's falsely accused of attempting to rape her. And what happens? He gets thrown into prison. And he does the best he can there. And God promotes him there. And then some time passes, and high-ups in Pharaoh's government are thrown into prison. One is released, and one is executed. And Joseph interprets their dreams and says, this is going to happen to you, and this is going to happen to you. And he says, please don't forget me when you're restored to your position of honor. And what does the man do? He forgets him, and time passes. Then he remembers, and God brings Joseph out at just the right time. Just the right time. And Joseph is given the authority over all of Egypt, and eventually reveals himself to his brother, excuse me, and to his father, and so this is what happens. Joseph's father Jacob is dead, and the brothers are very worried. Wouldn't you be? This poor man has suffered all these things, and it's your fault. And so they said, we're your slaves. Don't kill us, don't torture us, just let us be your slaves. Look at Joseph's answer. But Joseph said to them, don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God? Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I'll repay. You don't need to do it. Am I in the place of God? Notice the key, and this is what we're after, verse 20. You intended to harm me. Literally in the Hebrew, you intended it for evil. You intended it for evil. And then he says, but God intended it for good. to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then don't be afraid. I'll provide for you and your children." And He reassured them and spoke kindly to them. How can you forgive your enemies? How can you forgive people who treat you like a dog or treat you worse than a dog? How can you forgive people? You've got to have Joseph's thought. And Joseph's thought is this, God is in control of the world, not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from Him. The hairs of my head are numbered by Him, and God is ordaining, Romans 8, 28, all things together for my good. And if we don't have that, brothers and sisters, we don't have anything. have anything. What do you do when terrible things happen? Because terrible things happen to people. You don't live long in this world without bad things happening to you. What do you do when those things happen? To know people well is to know their troubles and their miseries. And the suffering of many people is overwhelming, and you wonder how do they get through? You know I have to say, and this is a terrible thing in a way to say, But I had a ministry of counseling for many years and the reason it was successful was I never accepted anything for it or charged for it. So there's this guy that counsels people for free. And once in a while I would talk to somebody and I would present. Here's where it is. Here's God's way and here's your own way. And your own way leads to death. And this is pretty bad. I did this a few times. I pulled out a bullet that I kept in my office, and I tossed it into their lap. And I said, you know, if you don't have God in this world, what have you got? What have you got? Why don't people commit suicide if they don't believe in God? And I said, here's the problem with suicide. You think that suicide is going to put you out of your misery. But suddenly there's the searing pain and you think, it's going away, but it doesn't end. It goes on and on and on forever. So I always made sure that they understood that I wasn't advocating suicide. I was simply saying, if you don't believe in God, I have nothing to tell you to prevent you from taking your life. But I do have something to tell you to keep you from taking your life. This is my Father's world, and I rest me in the thought, and though the wrong seem oft so strong, God is the ruler yet, and that's what I rest in. And Joseph is able to turn to his brothers and say, as for you, You dirty, rotten scoundrels. You meant it for evil. You meant to harm me. You hated me." They were jealous of Joseph because they knew that their father showed favoritism to Joseph over them. And Joseph's very presence made them feel condemned. They hated him. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Is God the author of sin? Is He the author of evil? And the answer to that is yes and no. Listen very carefully. God is the author of everything in this world, be it good or evil, but as far as God is concerned, He intends it for good. God has a good purpose in all that happens, even when people do horrible things. Think with me for a moment, in closing, of the worst thing that ever happened in human history, and that's when man killed God. Men gathered together and they tortured the eternal Son of God And then they nailed Him to a cross. They killed God. Not in His deity, but in His humanity. Jesus, who is true God and true man, was killed in His humanity. It's the worst thing men have ever done. Yet it's according to the eternal plan of God for good. He used Pontius Pilate. He used Herod. He used the Jewish people. He used the Gentiles. And they intended it for evil because they hated Jesus. But God intended it for good. And so the purposes we think of Isaiah 45 is, we should take great comfort from the fact that God not only knows the future, He predicts the future when it's important for people to know. And it was important that this pagan king in Isaiah 45 know that God had named him by name for a purpose, that he would rise to power to release the Jewish people, and he always treated them kindly. It's important that we suck great comfort from that ourselves because God is in control. And it's important to remember that God being in control does not mean that bad things won't happen. But it does mean this, God always intends them for our good, for us who love God, even though they're evil. So what's happening in the world today? I don't know, but I'll say this, what's happening in the world today and what will happen tomorrow, which is what I don't really know, is all for our good. Whatever's going to happen, God has planned it before the world began to bless each of us, to take us to be more like Jesus and working the events of our lives. Do you ever have a time in your life when you think, God, I can't take anymore. What's going to happen? Everything's coming apart at the seams. What's going to happen? Well, God's involved in the whole thing. And He's involved in the whole thing so that you and I would take great comfort that this is our Father's world. He forms the light and the darkness. The prosperity and the evil, but from God's perspective, it's all for good because God's intention towards us is holy and utterly and entirely good. May we pray. Lord, bless us and keep us in your mercy and grace. Bless this word that it would encourage us. Lord, we pray that you would not let us be afraid, but we would remember that we are the sheep of your pastor and Lord that you love us not just to take care of us but to send your son into the world to suffer terribly through the hands of hateful men because you loved us and you wanted to provide us with salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.