Episode Transcript
Good morning.
It's 10 o'clock and we are in the fifth chapter of Job.
So go ahead and turn there or scroll there.
It's good to have everybody.
We've got at least two visitors this morning.
We have several visitors, actually, but some first-time visitors, Pete and Helena.
We got their beautiful children over there situated in the children's Bible studies.
And so we're going to do ours this morning.
And want to welcome all the students who've shown up and the ones who tune in online.
To our broadcast.
You know, when you hear the word student, it probably makes you think of children from elementary school or perhaps high school or even college.
But a student is anyone who studies.
And if you're a Christian, you are a student.
Now you may be a bad student because you rarely study your Bible, or perhaps you're a good student.
If you're here, you're a good student.
So welcome to the good students.
Being here or online tells me that you're interested in studying your Bible.
And did you know I'm also a student?
I'm just one student teaching the others because teaching is a particular gift that God has given me and has given others, like our pastor.
And there are many teachers who are better than I am.
I can promise you that.
And there are some Bible students who are not teachers, but who know more about the Bible than I do.
I'm trying to catch up with them.
But I'm not ashamed to continually be a student of God's word.
Timothy was a pastor, and Paul told him to study to show thyself approved.
He said, Be a student.
All right, last week we left off in Job chapter 5 and verse 21.
In the middle of the verse, where we learned about the scourge of the tongue and how, as Eliphaz says, we will be hid from the scourge.
And we would say the word hidden.
And of course, hiding us from the scourge of the tongue is God's work.
We can put our fingers in our ears and make all kinds of noises to say we don't hear things you know how you did when you were a child.
But we can't hide ourselves from the scourge of the tongue.
It's like a whip, as we studied last week.
And we read some verses about the tongue.
And of course, there are many more verses we could have read.
We could read verses for several weeks about the tongue.
Brother Doug and I were talking last week about teaching the Bible, and he asked me a very good question, and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing it.
He asked, How do you know when you've taught on a verse long enough before it's time to move on?
And I thought that was a fantastic question.
And I told him to think about that question from the perspective of the student.
Now, although we learn things at different speeds, The time to move on from a verse is when the students have learned the verse.
That's when.
And after that, there's no need to stay with that verse because there's more to be taught.
We have to go on.
God didn't just give us one verse to teach on all the time.
Think about how that applies to teaching someone the gospel.
Once a student learns the gospel, The teacher doesn't need to reteach it every Sunday and every Wednesday.
Hebrews chapter 6, verses 1 through 2.
The writer said, Therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection. not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms and of laying on of hands and of resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment.
So those doctrines Paul mentioned are the foundations of what we believe.
They form the foundation.
And a Christian should have a working knowledge of those doctrines.
So, when we come across those doctrines in other places in the Bible, then they'll be easier to recognize.
And we don't have to stop the teaching and say, now, let me tell you what the gospel is if you don't know.
And with all that being said, let's continue our learning about the scourge of the tongue before we move into the next verse.
And for those of you just joining us on the internet or in person, we are in Job chapter 5, verse 21.
From the scriptures we read last week, we learned the tongue is sharp.
It's poisonous and it starts fires.
It's untamed.
I'm going to tell you what brought me more trouble than anything else in my life, and that is my tongue.
And oh, if I could take back all the evil things that I've said, the inappropriate words I've spoken, especially in my youth, but I can't.
I can't take them back.
Those words go out and they can't be recalled any more than you can recall the whip once it struck the back of the person who's being scourged.
I let those words out of the gate, didn't I?
We've studied in the Proverbs how the mouth, the lips, or a gate.
And when I think of what Jesus did for me, I think about all the sins of my tongue that he has put away.
He's washed them in his own blood.
But because of those words, my tongue was a scourge.
And I hurt many people with the words I said.
Sometimes I still hurt people by what I say, or in many cases, how I say it.
I received official notification of that part when I was raising little girls.
It's not what you're saying, it's how you say it.
Anybody in here raised girls, you're saying amen, even though you didn't say it out loud.
And even though some of those people, hopefully most of them, have probably forgiven me.
They won't forget the sting of my poisonous tongue.
It left wounds on their hearts, just like a whip leaves wounds on one's back.
Now, knowing what the scourge of the tongue means, knowing what the Bible means when it says that, let's see how God hides us from it.
That's what Eliphaz said.
You shall be hid from the scourge of the tongue.
Now, I leaked a little bit of the answer to you when I testified that Jesus died for the sins of the tongue.
But Christians need to be hidden from the scourge of the tongue of the other sources as well.
There will be things that people say about you who are Christians, and those things will hurt.
Jesus said, A man's foes, his enemies, will be they of his own household.
Do you realize there are people of your own household in many cases?
Who will speak against you because you're a Christian?
Now, if you're obnoxious at Thanksgiving and you get in people's face with your religious beliefs and you try to Force feed people things and they say, I don't want to hear it, and you keep on.
Well, that's on you.
That's your manner being offensive.
But if somebody says, Well, I don't like the way you believe.
Let's say it's your brother.
I don't like the way you believe.
I think you're a fool.
I think you're a weak person.
You use religion as a crutch.
And all these things have been said to people and about people.
Those people of your own household can hurt you.
And we who believe the gospel, whether it be from one in our household or a total stranger, We who believe the gospel will be shamed and ridiculed by those who do not.
And among the instruments that are used to harm us in these days and in those coming days.
It will be their words that leave the deepest cutting wounds.
For some Christian parents, their own children will speak against them and their faith.
For others, the parents will criticize the children's Christian faith.
The Christian woman who thinks it wise to marry the unsaved man because he seems to be stable and have a good head on his shoulders and all of that.
She'll suffer the sting of his hateful words one day, the scourge of his tongue.
Christians at large and Christian parents will indeed feel the scourge of the tongue.
But there's another group of Christians, a particular group of Christians, who have been targeted by that malicious tongue.
And they have the emotional scars to prove it.
And this group is comprised of Christian pastors.
Not all pastors are Christians.
And in fact, scripturally speaking, if they're not Christians, they're not pastors either.
They're wolves in sheep's clothing.
And thank God for pastors throughout the ages and around the world today who have stayed true to the teaching of God's word.
They haven't tried to win people over with ornaments and all kinds of extracurricular things, with flashy presentations and all of that.
Things that many churches use today to try to attract people and try to keep them These pastors have obeyed the command that the Lord Jesus Christ gave to Simon Peter when he said, Feed my sheep.
He didn't say, Entertain my sheep.
He said, Feed my sheep.
And for their obedience to that command, many of those pastors have suffered greatly.
Some were imprisoned, tortured, and even killed, and that will continue to happen.
But in most cases, whether or not the scourging was physical, Those pastors have endured the scourge of the tongue.
Now, first, we'll look at what the heathen said about Those Christians, the pastors, the apostles.
Listen to what the Apostle Paul wrote about how he and his fellow laborers.
Were treated by the world.
It's found in 1 Corinthians 4, verses 10 through 13.
If you're taking notes, you can write that down.
Instead of trying to hurriedly turn there, and I'll read it.
1 Corinthians 4, verses 10 through 13.
He wrote, We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ.
We are weak, but ye are strong.
Ye are honorable, but we are despised.
I underline that word in my notes.
Even unto this present hour, we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place.
And labor working with our own hands being reviled.
I underline the word reviled.
We bless.
He said, being reviled, we bless.
Being persecuted, we suffer it.
Being defamed, I also underline that word, we entreat.
We are made as the filth of the world, and are the off-scouring of all things unto this day.
Paul said, We're despised.
Meaning, the things that were said about them were said to dishonor them.
They were reviled.
And that means they were reproached, they were verbally abused.
He also wrote, they were defamed.
Which is translated as the word blaspheme or blasphemy many times in the New Testament to speak evil against.
And here they were preaching the gospel to Gentiles just as God sent them to do.
Paul wrote, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
And the Greek would represent the Gentile, the non-Jew.
So they were preaching the gospel to the Gentiles.
And what thanks did they get for that?
They got the scourge of the tongue.
And much more.
And although God gave them the grace to bless their revilers, to bless those who spoke evil against them.
He gave them the grace to put up with the persecution, to entreat, which is to exhort or to comfort the very people who defame them.
Although he did all of that, don't think for a minute that those words, those cutting words, didn't wound them emotionally.
Nobody is so spiritually mature that they can withstand the scourge of the tongue without having any kind of emotional response.
And although we learn or should learn to control our words and our actions, What we can't control is that blood rushing to our face when somebody says something really hurtful to us, especially because of our faith in Christ.
When someone publicly ridicules us for preaching the truth, or when someone singles us out as a fool for clinging to our Bibles.
When someone says, hey, we're having a function, oh, that's right, you go to church, never mind.
Little slights like that.
A few years ago, it's been a few years now, a woman came up to me before Sunday school And she got right in my face.
And she shoved a piece of paper toward me with a bunch of questions she'd written down, and she wanted me to answer why we did certain things the way we did them.
One of the things she objected to is that we did not call on women to pray publicly, and she had several other matters like that.
And my flesh wanted to push her back one step out of my space.
Or to tell her, Hey, get back.
Let's have a conversation at a social distance.
And I was irritated, and I'm sure it showed on my face.
She used her tongue as a whip.
But God's grace allowed me to withstand that onslaught, to take the paper from her.
And to promise her I would read all of her objections to the way we've done things long before she arrived here.
I did read those questions, and I did respond to them, but I wrote to her husband, which was the proper way to do that.
I'm not going to correspond with a woman without her husband being involved or without my wife being present.
It's just bad business.
And those are things, and I mentioned these things to him because he was a student of the Bible and even a teacher of the Bible.
And I said, those are things that you can answer for her and teach her at home.
And she and her husband left soon after that encounter.
We looked at The scourge of the world's tongue against the apostles, of the unbelievers against the apostles.
Now let's look at another group whose tongue Has been a painful scourge to pastors.
And that's the religious crowd.
The ones who say they're Christians, and in many cases are not.
In Matthew chapter 9, Jesus cast a devil out of a man.
A man was possessed.
And down in verse 34, Matthew 9:34, listen to what the Pharisees, the religious Jews, the scholars of the law said to him that day.
But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils.
They're speaking of Jesus.
He casteth out devils through the prince of devils.
They accused him of using the power of the prince of devils rather than the power of the Holy Spirit to cast the devil out of this man.
They may as well have called Jesus a servant of the prince of devils rather than the son of God.
You know, the Pharisees, these religious Jews, descended from Jacob just like Jesus did through the seed of the woman, through his mother.
And they claim to worship the same God.
They claim to believe the writings of Moses and the prophets.
And those very writings, as Jesus testified to them, testified of him.
But the Pharisees refused to believe him.
And so they were religious, but they were unbelievers, many of them.
Now listen to Jesus express his love for the Jews, including these people.
In Matthew 23, verse 37, Matthew 23, verse 37, after the scourge of the tongue had done its work.
He said, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.
How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.
These Pharisees and their children were among the ones whom Jesus would have gathered under his wings.
But they refused him.
So the terrible words they spoke against him were a scourge, and Jesus grieved over those words.
He didn't say, ah, that's no big deal.
Oh, it was a big deal.
The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
Do you know who else inflicts wounds upon us with the scourge of the tongue?
It's the devil, Satan.
This goes for pastors and, in fact, all Christians.
Revelation chapter 12, verses 10 through 11.
Revelation 12 verses 10 through 11.
He wrote, And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, now is come salvation and strength.
And the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ.
For the accuser of our brethren is cast down, listen to this, which accused them before our God day and night.
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they love not their lives unto the death.
Satan accuses us day and night.
And he does it before God.
Can you imagine him telling God on us?
Now, let's look now at how God will hide us from the scourge of the tongue.
And let's be reminded what the word hid means in our text back in Job 5:21.
We looked at it last week.
It means to be held in a secret place, to be secreted.
You know, hiding can be initiated by man as when he hides himself in a cave, and you'll see that in the Bible.
Or it can be when someone else hides him, as is the case here.
And using the context of the verses before and after this one.
It's obvious that Eliphaz, who is speaking in Jod 5:21, is speaking of the things God does for the people in various predicaments.
And there was a verse I read in my study, and it seemed to best capture what it means for a person to be hidden.
Although in this verse it's portrayed in an earthly sense, you can always take a spiritual lesson from it.
It's in 1 Samuel 19, verses 1 through 2.
1 Samuel 19, verses 1 through 2.
And Saul spake to Jonathan his son and to all his servants that they should kill David.
But Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted much in David.
And Jonathan told David, saying, Saul, my father, seeketh to kill thee.
Now, therefore, I pray thee, take heed to thyself until the morning, and abide in a secret place, and hide thyself.
Now, a secret place in that verse is a hiding place, and even though the Hebrew words are different for secret place and hide.
They have very similar meanings.
And if a place is truly a secret place, that means nobody else knows where it is.
And if nobody knows where it is, then nobody else can snatch you from that secret place.
You're hidden.
Now, this is human nature.
I say this around a place where I work.
There are certain things at my workplace that are supposed to be confidential and remain only with one or two people.
And I claim the saying that someone else made up, the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is.
Dead, that's right.
That's human nature, isn't it?
But theoretically, if you're in a secret place, nobody else knows where you are, except those who know the secret.
You're hidden.
All right, do you have that picture in your head?
David would hide himself in a secret place, and nobody would be able to harm him there.
And that was the purpose of him going to that secret place to keep Saul from killing him.
Now let's look at the spiritual application here that the psalmist makes in Psalm 91, verses 1 through 4.
Psalm 91, verses 1 through 4.
This is your verse, if you're a Christian.
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress.
My God, in Him will I trust.
Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler. and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.
His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.
Where did Jesus say he wanted to gather Jerusalem's children?
As a hen gathereth her chicks under her wings.
That's the image here.
And so that verse in Psalm speaks, or that passage in Psalms speaks of a spiritual refuge, a hiding place.
A refuge from the spiritual wickedness that proceeds from Satan.
You can't outrun Satan on your own, only in the power of the Holy Spirit.
And the snare of the fowler is a device the bird hunter uses to catch his prey.
He lays a trap, it's called a snare.
The bird walks through it, catches his foot on it, and it pulls him up in the air, and then the fowler or the bird hunter gets it.
Well, you know.
Satan has such a device.
He has a lot of devices.
The Bible says we're not ignorant of his devices.
But he has such a device, a snare.
2 Timothy chapter 2, verses 24 through 26.
2 Timothy 2, 24 through 26, where Paul wrote to Pastor Timothy, And the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men.
Apt to teach, that's what we're doing here, patient in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves, if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth. and that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.
The sinner has been taken captive by the will of the devil.
But the gospel that brings repentance to the acknowledging of the truth Is what delivers that sinner from that snare.
That's the only way the sinner can recover himself from the snare is to acknowledge To repent, to change his mind about the truth and acknowledge it: that Jesus died for sinners.
You know the snare is a device of Satan, and so is the scourge of the tongue.
The tongue belonging to our persistent accuser, the devil.
Now, as we read before.
There was nobody who felt the scourge of the tongue more than Jesus.
His own countrymen.
The religious crowd and the Gentiles alike spoke hateful, condemning words against him, and yet he loved them, and he loved them with a perfect love.
But he died for all those sins, and it is because the Lamb of God died that we Shall overcome the scourge of the tongue because we have a refuge.
We have a secret place where we are hid from the scourge of the tongue.
And it's under the shadow of the Almighty, under his wings.
And although We may suffer greatly in the flesh, and many of our brethren in the past and even now suffer more than we can imagine.
But although we suffer greatly in the flesh emotionally when those cruel, unjust words of the wicked come against us, we're hid from that scourge positionally.
From Satan's accusations and from the accusations of all of his followers, from all the reviling, the defaming.
We're exonerated by the blood of the lamb.
Satan can say, aha, Andy Shepherd committed all these sins.
The blood of the lamb has covered that.
I'm exonerated.
It's not that I didn't do it.
It's that I did do it, and those sins have been put away.
We are hid from the scourge of the tongue.
Listen to Colossians 3, verses 2 through 3.
Colossians 3, verses 2 through 3.
Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
Nelda memorized this.
She was the first one in our church to memorize that whole chapter when we did that several years ago.
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
There you go.
It's hid with Christ in God, even though the tongue scourges and slays us.
We're not trying to curry the favor or the approval of the world.
Christians shouldn't go about trying to make the unbelieving world say good things about us.
Of course, we don't want to be rightfully accused of being thieves because we shouldn't be thieves.
Or liars or fornicators or murderers or blasphemers.
1 Peter chapter 2, verse 12.
1 Peter chapter 2, verse 12, he wrote, having your conversation, that's your manner of living, your walk.
Honest among the Gentiles, that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they shall behold, means they can see them.
Glorify God in the day of visitation.
Now, the day of God's visitation is the day that He searches out the hearts and the ways of all men.
And he punishes those evildoers for every false accusation they made, every hateful speech they made.
And all their other sins.
But because we are hid in Christ from that scourge. then we don't need to worry about trying to convince the naysayers that we're not what they say we are.
If that's what you, I'll tell you what, I'll bet some of you have tried this before.
Don't raise your hand.
I'll bet some of you have tried to set somebody straight on Facebook on a comment.
Somebody said something, maybe you put a post, or maybe you commented on a post, and somebody came after you with the fangs showing.
And you thought, well, I'll just use reason and logic with them.
And so you put your post down below there.
And then they come at you with something else.
They don't want reason and logic.
They call you names.
They say that you're hateful and you're bigoted and you're narrow-minded and all that.
After a while, you just have to quit, don't you?
You have to say, you know what?
I'm not going to convince this person.
To see things the way I see it, you'll never convince them with the truth.
Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't tell people the truth because you should.
What else do we have to give to this lost world?
Shall we just go along with them or just not say anything ever?
No.
We have, Jesus tells us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
And then, when somebody won't receive your witness, what did he tell his disciples to do?
He said, shake the dust off your feet and go on.
And you're never going to convince the wicked with the truth because they hate the truth.
And remember, by setting your affections on things above, you'll not be as sensitive to the scourge of the tongue as you would be.
If your affections were on the things of this world, if your affection is on getting the approval of people around you, of being popular, of being the guy that everyone talks good about, And somebody doesn't, you're going to be particularly sensitive to the scourge of the tongue.
But if you say, you know, I would hope that people objectively would look at my life and say, you know, Brother Andy seems like a good guy, good neighbor, good person, good citizen, whatever.
But if they don't, I know what Jesus says about me, forgiven.
God sees me through him.
The world doesn't see me through Jesus Christ.
They see me with their own wicked eyes, and that's how they judge me.
You've been hid from that scourge.
Now, looking at the next part of Job 5:21, Eliphaz says, Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh.
Meaning, not only will you be hidden from the scourge of the tongue, but you also will not be afraid of destruction when it comes.
What does it mean to be afraid?
Now we might take that answer for granted, but let's see what the Hebrew language teaches us about that word and about that concept.
You know, until sin entered into the world, there was no fear.
Wouldn't that be something to live in a world where you're never afraid of anything?
Nobody was afraid.
Adam and Eve were not afraid.
But sin brought man a reason to be afraid.
Genesis 3 verses 8 through 10.
Genesis 3 verses 8 through 10.
Speaking of Adam and Eve after they'd sinned.
And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked and I hid myself.
Did you know the emotion of fear is the result of sin?
The emotion of anger is the result of sin.
The emotions of sadness and embarrassment and all the other negative emotions that cause us stress, the wrong kind of stress, were the result of sin.
And looking at Adam's fear, what do you think he was afraid of?
He was afraid of the consequences of his sin.
Adam and Eve ate of that tree, and Adam knew God was serious about those consequences.
Adam knew he would die.
And so he tried to hide himself from the God who would execute that sentence.
Now the very fact that Adam did not drop dead immediately, and Eve also.
Of eating that fruit tells me that God had already planned redemption for man.
Because perfect judgment, justice without mercy, without grace, would have been kill them and send them to hell and wrap this thing up, and we don't need this anymore.
That would have been absolutely just and perfect.
And yes, in that day, Adam and Eve died spiritually.
And they were separated from God in that respect, and then their bodies began that death process.
We know Adam died later on because Genesis 5:5 says, and all the days that Adam lived were 900 years. 930 years, and he died.
But the fear of death is what caused Adam.
To hide himself.
So, logically, we can say a consequence is what makes a person afraid, even if that consequence doesn't come to pass immediately.
Or at all.
People are still afraid of it.
For some people, being afraid can become pathological.
And even cause them to suffer mental illness.
Example: if a person says, I can't go outside because I'm afraid the moon will fall on my head and kill me.
Well, the probability of that happening is almost zero.
So that fear is unreasonable.
It's based on a distorted perception of reality.
Most people who live in fear are afraid of things that may not even come to pass.
Socially speaking and physically speaking, a healthy fear Is the fear of crossing Highway 175 on foot without looking both ways.
And you still might not make it.
I'm afraid to cross my neighborhood street without looking both ways.
But instead of never crossing the street and hiding myself in the house, what do I do?
I look both ways and make sure I get across that street in time to not be run over.
The fear of that. of that consequence doesn't cripple me, but it's there.
Now in our text, it's the fear of destruction that's in view that Eliphaz is talking about.
So let's hone in on that a little bit.
In our closing moments, what does that word destruction mean in our text?
It means violence, it means oppression.
And it's also translated as other words in the Old Testament, such as the words spoil and robbery, desolation, oppression, and so forth.
Now, during the tribulation, there will be much destruction taking place here on the earth.
It's not the wrath of God.
This is during the tribulation.
And Jesus knew that, so he encouraged his disciples by saying these words in Matthew chapter 24, verses 6 through 7.
Matthew 24, 6 through 7.
He said, And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars.
See that ye be not troubled.
For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
And there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places.
That sounds like a lot of destruction, doesn't it?
And it will be.
Now, I don't like war any more than probably any of you, but sometimes it is necessary to preserve the safety of a nation.
But it always results in destruction on one level or another.
The two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 caused immense destruction.
Lives and property.
The atomic bombs did not discriminate between women and children and soldiers and civilians, animals.
So many of them were killed or maimed, but the bombs that caused the destruction caused the Japanese to surrender, preventing total destruction.
And the fact of war and its inevitability shouldn't cause us to be afraid.
Jesus said there will be wars and rumors of wars.
Now, reading about the tribulation and the persecution of the saints and what will happen during that time, and you can read all of that in Matthew 24.
It just gives it in wonderful order.
Eliphaz rightly said, Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction.
However, did you know there remains yet another destruction, even after all that earthly destruction, there remains yet another destruction.
After a person dies.
In Luke chapter 12, verses 4 through 5, Luke 12, 4 through 5, Jesus said, And I say unto you, my friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.
But I will forewarn you whom you shall fear.
Fear him which, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell.
Yea, I say unto you, fear him.
Now, nobody looks forward to the dying process, whether it be brief or lengthy.
But because we fear God and have trusted in his Son for our salvation, the worst thing this world can do to us is kill us, kill the body.
That's it.
The world cannot cast us into hell.
And being cast into hell is what the unbeliever better be afraid of.
He better be in fear of it.
He shouldn't fear the one who can only kill him.
He should fear the one who can not only kill him, but has the power to cast him into hell, the one who can destroy him.
But I'm glad the destruction order for this guy was nailed to the cross.
And if you believe on Jesus as your Savior, Your destruction order was also nailed to the cross.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you so much for the attention of the people, for the good attendance we had today online and here in the auditorium.
Thank you for your word and for building us up in the faith and teaching us.
And may your spirit cause the truth to be.
Lodged in our hearts and to affect our daily living, to strengthen our doctrine that we may rightly believe and rightly apply what we believe.
In Jesus' name, amen.
