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Ten Aspects of God’s Sovereignty over Suffering and Satan’s Hand in It
The following resource is from DesiringGod.org. The impetus of this conference comes from the ultimate reality of God as the Supreme Value in and above the universe. God is absolute and eternal and infinite, everything else and everybody else is dependent and finite and contingent. God Himself is the Supreme Value. Everything else that has any value has it by connection with Him. God is supreme in all things. He has all authority, all power, all wisdom and He is all good to those who wait for Him to the soul that seeks Him. And His name as the Creator and as the Redeemer and Ruler of all is Jesus Christ. The last four years, 9/11, tsunami, Katrina, and 10,000 personal losses have helped us discover how little the American church is rooted in this truth. David Wells in his new book Above All Earthly Powers, Christ in a postmodern world just published a week or so ago, says it like this. This moment of tragedy, referring to 9/11, this moment of tragedy and evil shown its own light on the church and what we came to see was not a happy sight for what has become conspicuous by its scarcity and not least in the evangelical corner of it is a spiritual gravitas or weight, one which could match the depth of horrendous evil and address issues of such seriousness. Evangelicalism now, much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore. In other words, our vision of God in relation to evil and suffering was shown to be frivolous. The church has not spent its time on the energy that it takes to go deep with the unfathomable God of the Bible. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, much of the church is choosing at this very moment to become more light, more shallow, more entertainment-oriented and therefore very successful in its irrelevance to massive suffering. The popular God of Fun Church is simply too small and too affable to hold a hurricane in his hand. Biblical categories of God's sovereignty lie like landmines in the pages of the Bible waiting for someone to seriously open the book. They don't kill, but they do explode trivial notions of God Almighty. So my prayer now for this conference is that God would stand forth in this room and in your life and reassert his Creator rights over our lives and show us his crucified and risen son who has all authority and heaven and on earth and waken in us the strongest possible faith in the supremacy of Christ and the deepest of comforts and the sweetest of fellowship with Jesus that we've ever known. The speakers that have assembled to address you in these days have all suffered. For some it is more plain than others, but you don't need to know the details of everyone. Suffice it to say that none of them is dealing with a theoretical issue. They live in the world of pain and loss where you live. They are aware, we are aware of who's here. People who are dying are here that have very little time left. People who love those who are dying are here. People who live with chronic pain every day of their lives, people who have just lost one of the most precious people in their lives, people who do not believe in the goodness of God or scarcely believe in God at all and are hoping perhaps beyond all imagination that here they might find that the gospel after all is true and able to sustain what they are facing. And some of you are here about to enter a season of suffering for which you are totally unprepared. These speakers are not naive about life or about who you are and they are glad and I am glad that you are all here whatever your condition or place in the pilgrimage of faith. You pray that you will never be the same again. The approach that I am going to take tonight is not to try to solve the problem or any problem of the sovereignty of God but to celebrate it with you by marking ten aspects of God's sovereignty over evil and Satan's hand in it, over suffering and Satan's hand in it. I want to make light appropriately of Satan tonight. I want him to be put in his proper place and I want God to be put in his place vastly more sovereign over Satan. My hope in doing this the first night is that it will beget by the power of the Holy Spirit through the agency of his word worship because I believe that if our minds can be brought simply to see and savour and be stunned by the majesty of the sovereignty of God and we respond in worship then our minds will be brought into a frame that will be able to receive whatever measures of solution God has chosen to offer us in the Bible. If you come to the Bible without Job's disposition of falling on your face, putting ashes on your head, acknowledging your sin and worshiping, you will not solve any problems in the Bible. So my prayer is that you would see God in his sovereignty from his word and worship. The definition of the sovereignty of God that I am operating with tonight is this. It is not merely that God has the power and the right to govern all things but that he does so always without exception. He has the right and he has the power to govern all things and he does so all the time without any exceptions. So I have 10 celebrated statements of God's sovereignty over Satan's work. Number one, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's delegated world rule. Satan is sometimes called the ruler of this world. Sometimes he's called the God of this world or this age. Sometimes he's called the prince of the power of the air and sometimes a cosmic power over this present darkness. All of those labels mean we should probably take very seriously his offer to Jesus in the wilderness when he says in Luke 4, 5, "The devil took up Jesus and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will be yours.'" Now that last statement is strictly true. If the sovereign of the universe bows in submissive worship to any being, that being becomes the sovereign of the universe. However, the other statement that Satan made I think is a half-truth. I can give this world and its kingdoms and its glory to whomever I please. No doubt Satan plays a huge role in the rise of Stalin's, Hitler's, Edi Amin's, Bloody Mary's, Saddam Hussein's into their murderous power. But he does this only by divine permission and within God's appointed limits. And the Bible makes that clear over and over again, for example, Daniel 2, 20. Daniel answered and said, "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons. He removes kings and sets up kings." Daniel 4, 17, "The most high rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will." And when those kings, through whatever agency of Satan, is involved under God's sovereignty, are put in place, they are not sovereign. Because Proverbs 21.1 says, "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord and he turns it wherever he wills." Evil nations rise and set themselves against the Almighty, Psalm 2. The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, "Let us birth their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us, he who sits in the heavens, laughs; the Lord holds them in derision." Do they think that their sin and their evil and their rebellion against him can thwart the counsel of the Lord? Psalm 33 verse 10 answers, "The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples, the Lord, the counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. God is sovereign over the nations and over all their rulers and all their satanic power behind them. They do not move without his permission and they do not move outside his sovereign plan." Psalm 2, "Let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's angels, demons, evil spirits." Satan has thousands of cohorts. They are called demons, evil spirits, unclean spirits, the devil and his angels. You get a tiny glimpse of this demonic warfare in Matthew, I mean in Daniel chapter 10. You remember that strange story where Daniel begins to pray, three weeks delay until an angel arrives with help and the angel explains the prince of kingdom, the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. So apparently a great demon over the prince of Persia fought against this angel and then God sent Michael to help him and he went on his way to help Daniel. And the Bible leaves absolutely no doubt in our mind who is sovereign in those skirmishes in the heavenly places. Though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him, his rage. We can endure for low his doom is sure. One little word will fail him and then you read in the scriptures, you read in the gospels some of these little words that fail him. Jesus meets legion, the man who had thousands of demons possessing him, destroying him. When they see Jesus they cry out, "What have you to do with us, O son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?" A very interesting little phrase before the time. They know their time is set. They know their time is set. What are you doing here early? So Jesus spoke to them one word, go. And they came out, all two thousand of them, and were destroyed with the pigs in the sea. And Mark in his story earlier puts it very boldly. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him. They say that has any thought that a demon can be disobedient to God and his son when they will for them to be obedient does not understand the authority of God. They obey him. We tremble not for him, his rage we can endure, and even though they slay him, they always must obey him. God is sovereign over Satan's angels. Number three, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's hand in persecution. The apostle Peter describes the suffering Christians like this. For adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. So the suffering of persecution is described here like the jaws of a lion that can close over a Christian trying to consume their faith. But do these Christians suffer in Satan's jaws of persecution apart from the sovereign will of God? When Satan crushes a Christian and their own personal Calvary, does God not govern those jaws the way he did for his own son's Calvary? Listen to Peter's answer. This is 1 Peter 3, 17. It is better to suffer for doing good if that should be God's will than for doing evil. In other words, if it is God's will that we suffer for doing good. We will. And if it is God's will that we not suffer for doing good, we won't. Satan does not have the last say in whether we suffer persecution. If God wills, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. The night in which Jesus was betrayed, an amazing encounter happened. I don't know if you've ever thought about this one. It's recorded in Luke 22, 31 and 32. Satanic power that night was in full force. And Jesus spoke into that situation words that were stunningly sovereign. He said to those who had come out to take him captive, "Have you come out as against a robber with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour and the power of darkness." You get one hour, then I'm coming out. This is your hour. I give it to you. My Father has ordained that the jaws close on me tonight. That the lion does not have the last say. God is sovereign over Satan's hand in persecution. Number four, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's life-taking power. The Bible is not glib. It does not take lightly the power of Satan to kill Christians or anyone else. Satan, according to John 844, you are of your Father the devil and your Father is a murderer from the beginning. He's a murderer, that's his specialty, he wants to destroy. And John tells us in Revelation 2, 10 that he does it successfully in this life. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison that you may be tested and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life. Is God then not the Lord of life and death? He is. None lives and none dies but by God's decree. See, now I, even I am he, and there is no God besides me. I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal and there is none that can deliver out of my hand, that can snatch to death any person whom God wills to live. James, the brother of the Lord, said this in a most remarkable way. In fact, this text probably has great an effect on me in breaking me any time my will begins to rise up as any text in the Bible. Let me read it for you. This is James 4, 13 to 16. Listen for the sovereignty of God over life and death. Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit." Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. It's a devastating text because it says the sentence, "I'm going to delude tomorrow," is arrogant if it's not accompanied at least tacitly by the statement, "If God wills that I wake up tomorrow morning." If he doesn't, I won't. If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. You will get hummed tonight or get to your hotel tonight if God wills. And if he doesn't, then we die. God not Satan makes the final call. Our lives are in his hands, ultimately, not Satan's. God is sovereign over Satan's life-taking power. Number five, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's hand in natural disasters. Hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, blistering heat, deadly cold, drought, flood, famine. When Satan approached God in the first chapter of Job, he challenged God in verse 11, "Stretch out your hand and touch all that he has and he will curse you to your face." And God says, "Behold, all that he has is in your power only against him, do not stretch out your hand." The result of giving Satan that much leash were two human atrocities and two natural disasters. One of the disasters reported in verse 16, "The fire of God fell from heaven, Job, probably lightning, and burned up the sheep and the servants and consumed them, and I alone have escaped to tell you, but the worst report came last." Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house, and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people and they are dead. Even though God had given Satan leash to do this, Job did not focus at all on Satan's agency. He focused squarely on God's. He said, "Job arose toward his robe, shaved his head, fell on the ground, and worshipped and said, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord, and the inspired writer adds, 'In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.'" You had discovered what many of you, many of us, have discovered, namely, there is small comfort in focusing on the freedom of Satan to destroy us. In the apologetics discussion, maybe the agency of Satan would lift a little burden from God's sovereignty for some, but for others like Job there is more security and more relief and more hope and more support and more glorious truth in despising Satan's hateful hand and looking straight past him to God for the cause and for the mercy of the Lord, which is exactly what Eli he, in chapter 37, helped Job see. Do you remember this part of the book where he says, "By the breath of God, ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. He loads the thick cloud with moisture, the clouds scatter his lightning. They turn around and around by his guidance to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world, whether for correction or for his land or for love. He causes it to happen, hear this, O Job, stop and consider the wondrous works of God." So Job's first impulse in chapter 1 was exactly right. When you go to the book of James in the New Testament to find a New Testament interpretation of the book of Job, this is what they fasten on, James 5, 11, "You have heard the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful." God not Satan is the ruler of the wind, and of course he's the ruler of the waves. Jesus woke from sleep in the boat with total authority, and he opened his mouth and said two words, "Be still, and the waves obeyed him, and they obey him today without exception." The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. There's not a plant or flower below, but makes his glories known, clouds arise and temps blow by order from his throne. Verse 6, "Let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's sickness causing power." The Bible is very vivid in this, that Satan causes much sickness, Acts 1038. Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, all who were oppressed by the devil, he was healing them, for God was with him. The devil had oppressed them. Luke 13, Jesus finds a woman who had been bent over, unable to stand up for 18 years. He heals her on the Sabbath, and then they criticize him. And he says this, "Od not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day, Satan bound her for 18 years." That's what this was, which is why Christ's healings are seen in the New Testament as the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and its final victory over all disease. All the works of Satan are going to vanish. It's right and good to pray for healing. In our prayer room, there are people who are very sensitive to the two ways that God gets glory by healing and by sustaining grace and sickness. Both are beautiful displays of the glory of God. If you go there for prayer, they will not make you feel awkward either way. Christ has bought for us complete and total healing. That's very plain in Isaiah 53 and in Matthew and in 1 Peter 2. He has promised, however, not that we get the whole inheritance in this life. And how much of the inheritance that he has purchased for us we get in this life lies squarely in his hands. Hours is not to judge or run the world. Hours is to pray to our Heavenly Father and trust his answers. If we ask him for bread, he will not give us a stone. If we ask him for a fish, he will not give us a serpent. He may not give us bread and he may not give us a fish, but what he gives us will be good for us and that he does promise without exception. We never pray in vain. One of my colleagues, Tom Steller, loves to say nothing never happens when you pray. But beware, beware lest anyone say that Satan is sovereign over our diseases. He is not. When Satan went the second time in the book of Job to get permission, God gave him more. And it says Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and smoked Job with sore boils from the soul of his feet to the crown of his head. So Satan explicitly smote him with boils from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. And his wife saw it. She despaired and said, "Curse God and die." And Job responded exactly the way he did in the case of losing all of his children. He looked right past the satanic cause and he said to her, "Shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord and not receive evil?" And be careful here because some have attributed to Job error or irreverence in that statement. And we know that's not the case and the reason we know it is because at the end of the book in chapter 42 verse 11, the inspired writer says, "Then came to him, all his brothers and sisters, and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him." I'll read it again. This is the writer describing what really happened, not Job's understanding or misunderstanding. Then came to him, all his brothers and sisters, and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord, all the evil, all the calamity, all the pain that the Lord had brought upon him. Satan is real and Satan is full of hate, but he's not sovereign in sickness. God will not give him that tribute, not even that. In fact, the Lord says to Moses, "Who made man's mouth? Who makes him mute or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord, God is sovereign over Satan's involvement in sickness." Number seven, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's use of animals and plants. Satan is sometimes described as a lion, metaphorically, a great dragon, a serpent of old, and it's not unlikely, therefore, that in his sickness-causing and death-dealing power, he would use animals and plants. The lion in the Colosseum, the black fly that causes river blindness, mosquito causes malaria, the birds that carry avian flu, the pit bull that attacks a child, the bacteria in your belly, which Barry Marshall and Robin Warren just discovered, caused your ulcers rather than stress and got the Nobel Prize for it last week. If Satan can kill and cause disease very likely, he has large and small animals and plants at his disposal, but he cannot make them do what God does not will for them to do. And the giant Leviathan that God made to sport in the sea, to the tiny gnats that God spread all over the land of Egypt, these little and large animals do what God commands them to do. And the clearest and most interesting place that we see it is in the book of Jonah, isn't it? The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah and it did exactly as it had been appointed. And the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah out on dry land. And then to show that its little creatures as well as large verse 4, chapter 4, now the Lord appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, but God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. So fish, plant, worm, all appointed, all obedient. Satan has a hand here, but it is not sovereign, God is. Eight, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's temptations to sin. Much of the suffering in the world is caused by man's sin against man. Satan is called in the Bible the tempter, the tempter. So he can do his work directly or he can tempt and you can do his work with him. That was the origin of all the misery in the world. Satan tempted Eve to sin and sin brought with it the curse of God on the natural order. And since that time, Satan's been tempting all human beings to do whatever would hurt them. The most famous temptations in the Bible, however, do not portray Satan as sovereign in them. Judas and Peter. Judas, listen to this, Satan entered into Judas who was called as scary it and he went away and discussed with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. So Satan entered into Judas, moved him off to betray Jesus. Luke tells us that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas was the fulfillment of Scripture, Acts 116. The Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas. And so Peter in describing this in his sermon in Acts says Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. And with Job, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away his own son, not Satan. Satan was not in charge of the crucifixion of Christ, God was. The denials of Peter are even more famous. We usually think of them as denials rather than temptations. Listen to this remarkable statement of Jesus to Peter before he stumbles into those denials. Simon, Simon, behold Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, not if, when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. It's exactly as it is with Job, Satan comes, gets permission to sift, to push Peter through the sieve and try to get his faith out of him through the sieve of threat. And Jesus says to Peter, I'm praying for you, and you will not stumble utterly. I know how far you will go. When you have turned, not if, when you have turned, strengthen your brothers. I have a plan, Peter, and I'm going to break your heart through Satan. Satan is not sovereign in the temptations of Judas. He's not sovereign in the temptations of Peter. He's not sovereign in your temptations, and he is not sovereign in the temptations of those you love. God is. And there's a great ground for celebration there. Number nine, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's mind-blinding power. The worst suffering that will ever be besides Christ's suffering is the suffering of hell. Satan is doomed to experience that suffering according to Revelation 20, verse 10. The devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. And Satan's aim is to take as many of us with him as he possibly can. And the way he does it, and it's the only way he can do it, is by blinding our minds to the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. And that's why we read in 2 Corinthians 4, 4. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. If Satan can succeed in blinding your mind to the glory of Christ in the gospel, then he can take you with him to hell. But if he cannot, if he cannot blind you to the glory of Christ in the gospel, then you will see it and you will believe in it because it is a self-evidenting power. The gospel is the power of God and the salvation to everyone who believes, the dupe first and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. So he says in verse 6 of that 2 Corinthians 4, "God who said that light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." The comparison there is between God's sovereign, let there be light at the beginning of creation and God's sovereign, let there be light in my dark heart. The only way that any of you ever got saved or will get saved is that you were blind, you were deaf, you were dead in your trespasses, you saw nothing beautiful in the cross, Jesus was boring or mythical. And then, beyond all your expectation, God said just what he did to Lazarus, "Arise, there be light!" and there was light in your heart, perhaps some of you had just started like a little glimmer at the end of the tunnel and you had to track it down and it opened to you. For some of you, it was like an explosion of light and everything changed. One way or the other, God's sovereignty to overcome my deadness is my only hope for escaping hell and being freed from the blinding effects of Satan's power. And God is sovereign over Satan's blinding effects. That's the only way any of us have hope for our children, hope for our dads, our mothers, our uncles, our aunts, the people we care about in our neighborhood. The only hope for the most hardened sinner is that God raises the dead and makes light shine out of nothing. Finally, number ten, let us celebrate that God is sovereign over Satan's spiritual bondage. Satan's enslaves people in two ways. One is through pleasure by making us think we don't need God because we have everything here and the other is by pain that makes us think God's not worth it, he's not good, he's not powerful, and he can get us from both sides, whether it's pleasure or whether it's pain, he can hold us in bondage and the only solution to either of those sins is repentance, we must turn by the illumination of Christ and say, "I renounce my reliance upon this world's pleasures as my treasure, and I embrace Christ as my superior treasure, and I renounce my doubts of God's goodness and God's power and wisdom, and I embrace God as he's revealed in the Scriptures, I repent of all my unbelief and all my idolatry and my skepticism, that's the only way anybody will be saved." Then we have a description of how that happens in 2 Timothy 2, 24 to 26, which so beautifully combines the human agency in it and the divine power in it. He goes like this, "And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may escape from the snare of the devil, having been captured by him to do his will." I wonder if I read it too quickly and you didn't hear it, let me say that phrase again, "God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and thus they escape from the snare of the devil, having been captured by him." So God grants repentance from our idolizing pleasure and from our skepticism about the goodness of God. He grants us repentance, and in that repentance the power of Satan is broken. Satan cannot eternally damage anyone who repents and turns to the living Christ. Satan is not sovereign over his captives, God is. In God grants repentance we are set free from the snare of the devil, and we spend our days celebrating and spreading the sovereignty of God. The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us in this room can imagine. You know a lot, but oh, if we gathered the statistics, if we gathered the photographs, if we gathered the stories, none of us come close to describing the horrendous evil in this world. But evil and suffering are not ultimate, God is ultimate. Satan the great lover of evil and suffering is not sovereign, God is sovereign. He does according to his will among the hosts of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can say to him, "What have you done, Daniel 4.35?" He declares the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose, Isaiah 46.10." Who has spoken, and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded, is it not from the mouth of the most high that good and evil come? Lamentations 3, 37. Many are the plans of the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will be established, Proverbs 19, 21. The lot is cast in the lap, and every decision is from the Lord, Proverbs 16, 33. Therefore, if God is for us, who can be against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or persecution, or famine, or peril, or nakedness, or sword, no? In all these things we are more than conquerors, through him who loved us. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread, are big with mercy, and will break in blessings on your head. Blind unbelief is sure to earn, and scan his work in vain. God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain. His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I so long to walk with my friends in the light of your sovereignty, your satan, and over myself, and so I ask, Lord, that you would draw near, and grant us eyes to see, hearts to savor and to worship. I pray that we would humble ourselves under your mighty hand, and I pray that we would walk in the light as you are in the light. And I pray, Lord, that strength of soul would come into us. I pray that those here, especially, who suffer most, would find themselves most deeply strengthened. Oh, may the inner man grow strong with the presence of Christ in this conference. Lord, leave us not to ourselves. Pour out the Holy Spirit upon us. Pour it out in the prayer room, oh God. Pour it out in the bookstore. Pour it out in all the hallways and in our seats. Grant, I pray, that we would be much in prayer, much in reliance upon you. Don't leave us, Lord, to ourselves. There are great and deep and awesome things that need to be done in this people. I commend them to you for your healing. I commend them to you for your sustaining grace in Jesus name, amen. Thank you for listening to this resource from DesiringGod.org. If you found it helpful, we encourage you to enjoy and share from thousands of resources on our site, including books, sermons, articles, and more, available free of charge. DesiringGod.org exists to help you treasure Jesus more than anything else, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
God is unquestionably sovereign over our suffering — even over Satan’s futile ploys to ruin God’s elect.