Please be comfortable. It’s most interesting to read the book of Job in the opening verses of the first chapter. The Lord God is approached by the enemy of all of us and said, I’ve been looking at your friend Job.
God was very fond of Job, it’s obvious. He says he’s a man who’s upright. He said he’s wonderful.
And the enemy said, I bet if you were to not be so protective of him and not treat him so wonderfully, I bet, I bet he wouldn’t be so faithful to you. So the Lord gave him permission. And it turns out if you read through the book of Job, not quite at halfway through the book, what the enemy predicted turned out to be true.
Job started questioning God. He asked an obvious question. Why do bad things happen to good people? I’ve done everything that I knew to support you and to be loyal to you.
Job didn’t totally lose out. The Lord was kind, generous, rescued him from his misery. All of that to say, difficulty and misery visits all people.
The same people who enjoy the gentle spring rains are the same people who at times cower when the lightning is flashing and we’re afraid the trees are going to topple. Same people. April and I are going through a great emotional stress just now because our precious friends in Vancouver, you know that recently I went to them, prayed with them, served them communion.
And Darrell called me and he said, I’m in the hospital with Elsie. And he told me what was going on. And I shared it with April and April broke into tears.
April loves Elsie like a precious sister. Why do bad things happen to some of the best people? We don’t know. We don’t know.
And Job was the one who did cry out, if he kills me, I’ll still trust him. Hebrew boys, throw us in the fire. He can deliver us out.
But if he doesn’t, we won’t bow. Darrell and Elsie are not giving up. She’s in the hospital.
I hope she’s going to get to come home. But their faith is strong. There’s two sides of faith, you know.
I’m going to get out of this bed. I’m going to run like a deer. That’s one kind of faith.
And another kind of faith is Job’s faith. He can raise me out of this bed, but if he chooses to take me home, I can accept that too. So Heavenly Father, we have a lot of hurt all around us.
And there are people in this service right now who are struggling because of trouble, of turmoil, of crisis. Crisis among ourselves, our relatives, crisis with some of us to do with our children. And sometimes the pain is almost more than we can bear, but we refuse to be crushed.
We can be knocked down, but we refuse to be knocked out. We trust you, Father God, with all our hearts, not because of what you do, but because of who you are. We love you, and we trust you.
Thank you for being faithful to us. Give us the stamina to be faithful to you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
He is there, and he’s not silent. I think this is part three. He’s not silent.
Psalm 19, verse 1, you know it off by heart. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament, King James, the firmament showeth his handiwork. Another translation, the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of his hands.
Isaiah 40, it is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in. Jeremiah 31, thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day, and fixed the order of the moon and stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea, so that its waves roar. The Lord of hosts is his name.
He made the earth by his power, Jeremiah said. He established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding he stretched out the heavens. I want to pause there for a moment, and just remind you of one little verse in the book of Genesis.
And God formed the man from clay, but when God formed the universe, he did so with wisdom and intelligence. I love that. God used matter.
He used soil that he had created, and then he made the man out of that soil. But when he made the universe, and the earth, and all the soil, and all the animal, and all the rest of it, he did it by his understanding, and by his wisdom. Isaiah 45, he says, I made the earth and created man on it.
It was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host. For I am the one who made the earth, and created people to live on it. With my hands, I stretched out the heavens.
All stars are at my command. I’m working with notes this morning. I find myself more and more these days using notes.
I’d like to think that it’s not my old cranky brain, but that I have so much wonderful preparation that I’m going to need notes to help me. Then there’s another side of it. If I didn’t have notes, we might be here, and you’d miss your lunch, and you’d be ordering take-in for supper.
My notes will hopefully keep me on track. So I’m going to start in another little launching pad. I’ve already done so with the reading of the scriptures.
He’s there, and he’s not silent. I want to talk about the fact that he is there, and I want to do so by rehearsing with you about this. Everything that we have, everything that we know, the universe that we’re a part of, like a grain of sand on a massive beach, that’s how important this planet is.
That’s how infinitesimally small we are. So go ahead, you World Economic Forum, rule this pebble if you should so choose. You’ll be heroes, and they’ll be writing books about you that eventually will pass away as the heavens and the earth pass away, because God’s going to make it all over again.
Your renown and your wonderment is going to fail with you. We have some questions that I want to dump on you this morning. We are living in this massive universe, and there’s a gnawing question that every scientist who has had his breakfast this morning is in wonderment and trying to figure it out.
The very fact of existence. Existence. You and I exist this morning, and we don’t think about that very much, and why should we? We just keep on moving along, and that’s okay.
That’s all right, but stop and think about it this morning. How did we get here? What was the beginning? How come there is nature? How did it come about? How do we explain the complexity of the vastness of the galaxies? Ever since I was a child, I was reminded that the sun doesn’t rise in the east and set in the west. The earth turns and gives us the sense that the sun is rising and the sun is setting, and we take the sun for granted.
Every morning it comes up. We assume it’s coming up and then it’s going down. That’s fine.
That’s our little existential moment. We live for the moment. Oh, it’s coming up.
Oh, it’s going down. Isn’t it glorious that it continues to come up, and then it continues to go down? If we were just a few thousand miles closer to the sun, we would be turned into crispy critters, but if the earth were to move just a little bit away from the sun, we’d be turned into an ice cube, and how long has this earth been spinning at exactly where it needs to be so that people can live on the planet? The big question is, is there another planet in the universe that can hold life? There are some scientists that can’t think, they can’t sleep, they can’t do it. There’s got to be, there’s got to be, there’s got to be.
Forget about it. Who cares? The glorious thing is that this planet is sitting exactly where it needs to be, and it never varies. It never moves out of its perfect cycle.
In fact, isn’t it something that we’re not colliding with a whole lot of other planets? Do you know how many planets are out there that this earth could collide with? There are billions, but here we are safe and sound. You’d wake up every morning and thinking, dear God, I wonder if the moon’s going to fly out of its orbit and come and hit us all. Do you know what? This universe that we live in is so complex, it’s complex by design, by design.
Forget about the fact that some brilliant scientist, I believe he was British, came up with the idea that we were all polywogs. Before that, we were amoebas. I’ve told you this one before.
Once I was a polywog with my tail so long and thin, but then I was a bullfrog. My tail was, it was tucked in. But then I swung from a great oak tree, but now I’m a professor with a PhD.
You are so complex. When you go to the doctor, I went, I was seeing doubles driving, coming home from a visit with people out in Font Hill, coming down the highway, Victoria, as I’m driving in the evening. I’d seen this before.
It was happening again and again and again. I saw about 20 sets of headlights coming at me. And I didn’t know what, this is crazy.
This is only a two lane highway and all these cars are coming at me. I was scared to death. My tears are running down my legs.
Like I’m thinking, dear Lord. And will I try and drive between them as they’re coming? Don’t go there, David. You don’t know what’s going on.
And so it turned out that there was only a couple of cars. And then there were these little markers along the side of the road that pick up the light and they reflect it to you. And then there were a few other things.
There weren’t 20 or some cars coming. I went to the doctor and they looked in somehow in behind my head. There was nothing else in there except, except apparently with your left eye, you see, you see the world.
And with your right eye, you’re seeing the same world, just a little different perspective. But the good thing is that those two eyes back in behind somewhere, those two pictures converge like this and get absolutely perfect. But my wonderful eyes almost do it.
And they stop about there just to learn about how the eyes work just and to find out mine are not. And then I got a few other things in my person. No, we won’t discuss this morning.
Get a little discussion. There’s a few other parts of me that don’t work so well these days. And it’s a painful thing that I go through.
So I found out that I have nerves. I sometimes wish that my nerves didn’t work quite so well. I feel pain quite acutely.
We exist. The world exists. And there isn’t a scientist anywhere at the highest university level that can give you one proper explanation.
How did it all happen? Not only how, when did it happen? When did it all start? When did it start? And what’s its breadth and its height and its length? They’ve got this wonderful telescope now called the web. When I was a young fellow, I remember hearing about a… I used to be able to do that kind of thing much easier. I heard about this telescope called the Hubble, right? And it just boggles your mind what the Hubble could see.
But then the Hubble, as the scientists were working away, it was kind of like to them, it was kind of like having a nice meal, but where’s the dessert? We want to see farther. And it turns out that in this vast universe, there’s a little bit of, I guess it’s pixie dust that’s floating around out there from explosions and from planets and whatever. And so the Hubble couldn’t, it couldn’t get through in its sight.
It couldn’t get through all of that stuff to be able to look at the billions of other stars. So somebody by the name of Webb took this upon himself. I don’t know a whole lot more than this.
And now they have, as a result of his expertise, now they have something that makes the Hubble look like a dinky toy. And they’ve sent the Hubble up on a satellite out there somewhere. And that satellite is rushing at an incredible speed out into the universe to help us discover some more.
We haven’t been able to solve cancer. There’s so many things that we can’t figure out here, but we got to get out the other end of the universe and find out what’s there. Something quite unique and interesting has happened as a result of that Webb thing that’s out there looking, looking, looking.
They found so many things. They found, they’re calling it a nursery amongst all of the stars, the galaxies. There’s a nursery out there.
This nursery is where new planets like the earth or stars like the sun, where they’re born. There’s new planets and suns being born all the time. And for lack of another explanation, they just say it’s acting like a nursery.
And they keep on looking farther and farther and farther away. But with this fantastic Webb camera telescope, they’ve discovered something that the universe is traveling. It’s moving and it’s moving at an incredible speed that we can’t explain.
We don’t know where it’s moving to. And the other unique thing is this, that it’s expanding. It’s expanding, expanding, expanding, expanding.
It’s getting broader and broader, which then brings these scientists to acquire. If it’s expanding, expanding, expanding, let’s go back then and find out when it started to expand. Here we go again.
Where did it all start? And they’ve come to this conclusion, and it’s not silly folklore. It just is the law of reality. If it’s continuously going, expanding like this, there has to be a starting point.
And they think they figured out about the starting point. And you probably have heard this word. They believed, they believed that the expansion started on a bang.
And they call it the Big Bang Theory. And some loose nut from Hollywood started up a sitcom called The Big Bang Theory. I haven’t watched it for more than 30 seconds.
The universe is enough. It’s enough bigger trial for me than to watch these people on there making millions of dollars with their stupidity. But I am quite enamored with this whole idea that with a bang, the universe started.
They really believe that it started that way. That this is how we got an billions of galaxies that are all within this universe. This is getting exciting.
It isn’t it? We’ve just figured this out. It happened in a moment in the twinkling of an eye. Boom.
And all of this stuff formed into stars and, you know, moons and earths and all the rest of it. And it just keeps on getting broader and broader and broader. Now, the fearful thing is, how long can this keep on going, getting broader and broader and broader? And nobody knows if it’s going to run out of energy or whatever.
So then somebody doesn’t take brilliance to talk to these scientists and say, that’s wonderful. You figured out that in a moment, it all started. Kaboom.
In order for there to be an explosion, you have to have some ingredients. You have to have some matter. You have to have something to start with.
How about a spaceship filled with gunpowder? You need something to start with. You’re going to blow up. What are you going to blow up? In other words, if this is the starting point, what matter, what used furniture, what old televisions had been all piled up here? What was back here that was kaboomed? Don’t tell me that it just went bang.
If you set off dynamite and you see rocks flying everywhere, you could actually probably, if you had the right kind of camera, trace back to the explosion and figure out where the rocks came from. What was back here before this? And the scientists say, well, that’s yet to be discovered because it appears that on this side of the big bang, there was nothing. There was nothing.
And I’m excited about this. This does not trouble me. Genesis 1, 1, in the beginning, God created.
It’s there. When we know, because this book says so, that God is behind the big bang, so-called, that just brings up a lot of other questions. About when God did that, how much was involved in setting the stars in their place? Establishing the rotation.
The sun comes up, the sun goes down. Oxygen, heat, warmth. Vegetation grows.
Birds fly. It’s so complex. It’s so complex that it just boggles the simplest or the greatest minds.
But then we go on from there and we say, wait a minute. In order for there to be a being that created, because there’s no other explanation. I have written this in my notes this morning.
I was going to drop it on you before I did, I’m going to throw it to you now. Creation, concept, creation as we know it, is not the best explanation for where we came from. It’s not the best.
It’s the only, it’s the only explanation. Because it’s not just the fact that it all started from nothing. From his wisdom, that is what God used to create this universe.
But the fact that it’s so complex, that takes intelligence, that takes, I’m going to use the word, person. Person. And for man then to create this earth, and do you know why he created the universe? He had you in mind.
The universe was created by God. I just read the verse a few moments ago. He created all of this for man to dwell.
The earth was created so you and I could be here. John 3, 16. This person who started it all.
This person is kind, is generous, and is loving. Personality. God has personality.
And he said, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, let us make man in our personality image. God loves us. He created all of this for us.
And when he made us, he made us like himself. To be thoughtful and to be creative. He gave us personality.
Isn’t it interesting that as persons, we know people that are noble. I was thinking of an illustration. I got a friend, his name is Duke.
He’s been here a couple of times. Comes on his motorcycle, sits in the back. Duke is a retired fire chief.
I’ve said to him, you’ve seen some pretty difficult things. He said, you don’t want to know, David. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t go there.
You don’t want to. He said, some firemen can’t continue because they can’t handle the devastation. To me, it’s a noble thing when a fireman rushes to a house that’s aflame, puts on as much fire-retardant equipment as he can, and still, sometimes they die in that.
Think about how many firemen died in the Twin Towers in New York City. That’s noble. God created man, and he gave him the ability to be noble, and he also gave him the freedom, as we see from Adam in the garden.
He gave us the freedom to mess it all up. We can be noble, and we can be cruel. He created us.
Cruelty in my lifetime, passing on, not, not considering because I wasn’t aware of things in 1945. That’s the year I was born, but I have visited the concentration camps, and I’ve seen the ovens. I went to that one in Poland, and I could not eat.
I couldn’t do anything for three days. I was wasted because of what I saw, but I realize that I have experienced another breakage in me when I’m now reading what the, what the press is not telling us. It’s coming from the people who have suffered in the caves.
It’s coming from the people who actually survived the October 7th massacre, when these people who were driven by a Koran murdered and raped and threw little children in an oven and raped a mother while the baby was burning to death. That’s cruelty. What are you trying to say, David? You were making us feel all warm and fuzzy.
God has created us with the freedom to be kind or to be ignorant and knowing well in advance, just like God knew that Job would fail, God knew that Adam would fail, and so the Bible says that Jesus was slain before the foundation of the world. It was already in the plan. This is a glorious God, and then we have this concept of morality.
Where did morals come from? If you don’t have a personal God, you have no foundation for morals, and we’re seeing that in this country right now with the Bible being tossed out, with politicians lying. You know when a politician’s lying, their lips are moving. The lies that are now being exposed that happened just in the last three or four months, the lies.
Who calls it a lie? And the mass media aren’t even reporting it. They’re not telling us. It’s all covering up, covering up.
It’s worse than the Joe Biden cover-up. This is diabolical. This is sick.
When you have no God, you have no morals. What’s wrong with a boy? Who says it’s wrong to kill a child, and who decides when it’s murder? Morality comes from God. He created us.
He knew we would fail, but He gave us Jesus to redeem us. God and what He created in the universe, there’s a great chasm between the two because the universe is a caused cause. God caused the universe, but God is the uncaused cause.
He causes. He causes and from nothing He can create. He’s totally separate from this universe He created but then God having made man, let’s say God made nature, made all these wonderful things, the animals and whatever, and God is so high above, so far removed.
He created that, but then God made man. And so you had another, yet another plateau here. God is so far removed from the universe in terms of elevation, in terms of value, but then He created the man, but He made the man a little lower than the angels.
He made man a lesser, so there’s a chasm between God and man, but there’s a chasm between the man and all the rest of nature. This is all I’m running out of time very fast. I want to read out of Job.
I knew I wouldn’t get through it all today. Yeah, I’m going to read this. The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and the Lord is answering all the scientists.
He’s answering the people who say we don’t need God. We don’t believe in God. We don’t need your church moral.
We don’t need you, and we don’t even believe that there is a God, and they’re acting like they don’t believe there’s a God. They will pretend when it’s needful. There’s a bunch of them on an airplane just arrived over in Rome.
There’s nothing spiritual, nothing biblical about them, but all of a sudden they show up. It’s all political. They’re not living a godly way, and this is the Lord’s response when they say we don’t need God.
We don’t need Christianity. We don’t need any of this. Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Words without knowledge.
Now prepare yourself like a man, God is saying to Job. Prepare yourself. Be a man.
I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know.
You’ve got the Hubble. Now you’ve got this wonderful telescope. What have you discovered now? Universities were established.
All of you great universities in the entire world were established by Christianity, by godly men, and they began their teaching in the very first day of every university. They started this way. God is.
Let’s discover his creativity. Let’s discover the glories of God, and now the class begins. We don’t believe in God, but we’re going to figure out how everything works, and we’ll do it on our own.
The Lord says, who determined the measurements of this universe? Who stretched the line upon it to what its foundation are fashioned? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth and issued from the womb? When I made the clouds its garments, and thick garments its swaddling band? When I fixed my limit for it and set bars and doors? When I said, this far you may come, but no farther, and here your proud waves must stop. Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Then it might take hold of the ends of the earth, and the wicked be shakers out of it. It takes on form like clay under a seal, and stands out like a garment from the wicked.
Their light is withheld, and the upraised arm is broken. Have you entered the springs of the sea? Have you walked in search of its depths? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Or have you seen the doors of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell me if you know this, the Lord says. He’s laughing.
He’s laughing at the scientists who have decided we don’t begin with God. Do I know what I’m talking about there? I do. I have a friend who’s teaching in a university in Ontario, and he’s kept it from the top dogs in that place, and he sits on one of the biggest chairs in a university.
They don’t know. He goes to church. They don’t know he believes in God.
If they find out, he’ll be fired. If you’re going to be one of us, you got to walk like us. You got to talk like us.
Professors have been tossed out if they refuse to use identity pronouns, and if you don’t understand that, they’re going to have a class for you. You can learn how to deal with these people whose feelings are so dainty, and where’s the way to the dwelling of light and darkness? Where is its place? That you may take it to its territory, that you may know the paths to its home. Do you know it? Because you were born then, or because the number of your days is great? Have you entered the treasury of snow, or have you seen the treasury of hail, which I reserve for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? By what way is light diffused, or the east wind scattered over the earth? I could read on and on and on.
This is the Lord talking to us overrated humans who think we have it all figured out, but when you talk to the scientist, he’s all excited because this wonderful new web outfit has come to the conclusion. It started. We know the universe has been out there for millions, billions of years.
We know that, but we know that it wasn’t always there, because if it had always been there, the lines would have been square and straight. No, the lines are converging somewhere over here at infinity. So we’re all excited because we figured that out.
And what was going on before that? Well, we haven’t got that figured out yet, and we never will, because nobody’s going to live long enough in a spaceship to go out there and find it. Beloved, it doesn’t matter how great is our God, how wonderful are his ways. The heavens declare the glory of God.
The pattern of it all. I got to finish. I’m about to.
April and I went to a, it was an evening thing. You needed to be young to appreciate the music. I wasn’t there for the music, so it was okay.
Too loud. It was okay. I was there to hear the preacher.
His name is Louie Giglio. He’s from a big church somewhere on the east side of the United States. Doesn’t matter what city.
Big church. Louie Giglio is not a scientist, but he hangs around with scientists. I have some videos by him, and I’m dying to roll one just here on a Sunday, but it’s longer than an hour, and I’m not going to get away with that.
When I watch it, I cry. It’s incredible. It’s an expose of the universe, and he gets all of his information from NASA scientists.
It’s absolutely glorious, and so we went to this meeting. A big place, like an arena, massive, and so after the music was all done, then Louie Giglio said, this is what astronomers, those who search out the universe through all of this equipment and so on, he said, here’s what they’ve discovered, and he says to the sound man, go ahead and play it, and what we were hearing over all this sound system was ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom. The heavens are not silent.
He said, where’d that sound come from, and listen to the rhythm of it, and it’s been going on for how long? He turned to the musician there. We sing that musician song, how great is our God, sing with me, how great is our, that song, that was the musician for that night, and he turned to the young fellow, whose name escapes me, you probably know it, and he says, have you got a song that goes with that? He said, oh, every song. He said, go ahead and play, so this young guy starts strumming to the sound coming out of the internet, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, and then some singers started in, I stood to my feet, you had to be there, you know, somebody says, the most wonderful thing, and then somebody says, oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, you had to be there, I’m telling you, in that arena with that sound that we knew was coming from the universe out there, from planets, from who knows where, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, and then this guy starts playing his guitar, and some other people start playing, the musicians play, and then some guys start singing songs, and we all caught on, and we’re all singing these songs.
We were singing with the hosts of heaven. How great is our God, sing with me, how great is our God, all will see, how great is our God, won’t you stand with me, how great is our God, sing with me, how great is our God, and all will see, how great, how great is our God. Something occurred to me.
I really am finished, but I got to drop this on you. I got thinking about our God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Why did he create you and me? If you’re going to say because he needed somebody to love, you’re wrong.
Father, Son, Holy Spirit, they are in fellowship, and their love is perfect and complete. God did not need me, he chose, and when he chose, he was expressing his love for God so loved all of us. He created us, he gave us life, and I got thinking about another religion.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, because you say one little word, and it’s hate. This isn’t hate talk. This is a fact.
Allah, okay, Allah, I read about it this week. I checked it out. What’s the belief from the Quran about Allah? Allah is one, and it states it very, and there’s none beside, one, and it says, and I said, I said, when did Allah create other individuals? And the answer is, he first created a prophet.
The prophet’s name was Adam, and then he created a second prophet. The prophet’s name was Eve. I don’t think that they honor women anymore, but that was, and then it goes on, you know, and the last prophet he created was Muhammad.
So in other words, when you say, tell me about this Allah, Allah doesn’t have other individuals except those that he created. God the Father did not create the Son. God the Father did not create the Holy Spirit.
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So what that would mean is that if you were of that religious tone, you would have to agree to this. Allah back here was all alone.
He had nobody to talk to. He had nobody to love. He had nobody to care for him.
He had nobody that he could care for, and so he created what is in the Quran. He created his slaves, and his prophets are to rule over them and reveal to them his will. So Allah was a lonely, potentate from eternity past, but the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit chose to spread their love to others, for God so loved you.
Is that special or what? Heavenly Father, thank you for your goodness and your kindness. Thank you that you are a person. You have all the traits of personality, and you made us just like yourself.
We are conscious of our existence. The animal lives, the animals are not aware, they’re not conscious. We are such a wonderful creation of your warmth and your generosity.
We are aware of you, and we are aware of ourselves, and we have the option of being crude and hurtful and wicked, or we can choose to be like a fireman who’s noble, to be like a policeman who’s noble, to be like people of honesty and integrity. Heavenly Father, we in this church today declare we choose to be noble. We choose to honor you by keeping your laws.
Bless your people today as we find our way out of this building. You’re so good to us. We love you.
Amen.
