Well, Bildad, like his predecessor Eliphaz, has what you might call a cash registered understanding of justice.

Right? You get what you deserve.

Right? Here's Job, he's pleading innocent, and then there's God, who's the judge.

There's no one in between.

There's no arbiter.

He needs somebody to represent him.

Thomas.

Well, this is lesson number five, and we are looking at Job chapter eight and chapter nine.

So why did Jesus die? There are only two answers to that question.

One is that there is no justice in the universe.

The other answer is, of course, the evangelical answer, the Gospel answer.

The reason why Jesus died was because he deserved it.

God had imputed our sins to him, and at that moment, he deserved death.

It's a principle of justice.

Here's Dr. Thomas.

Well, this is lesson number four in the Book of Job, and we're going to look at chapters four, five, six, and seven.

There are times of great euphoria, times of special peace, special sense of God's presence.

And then there are times when God seems far away, and they descend into a very dark place and wish they'd never been born.

Thomas.

Well, we come to Job chapter 3.

This is a dark night of the soul passage.

It probably doesn't get much darker than this chapter in the whole of the Bible, except maybe our Lord Jesus in Gethsemane.

Let's read a few verses from chapter 3.

After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.

Nothing happens outside of the decretive will of almighty God.

If you believe in that kind of sovereignty, then sickness is a part of that plan and purpose.

Christians get cancer.

Christians get dementia.

Christians lose limbs.

God's people, the choicest of God's people.

Thomas.

Well, turn with me to Job chapter two, and, uh, we'll read the opening verse together.

Register today at ligonier.org/alwaysreadysanford.

We can understand, can't we, why ungodly people suffer.

At least we want to think that way.

The problem of the book of Job is here's a godly man.

In fact, the godliest man perhaps on the face of the earth at the time.

And he experiences this trauma, this enormous, enormous suffering.

Thomas.

Let's dive in the first verse.

But if you don't have that inward sense, yeah, this is

isThis is what I want to do.

This is, this is the only thing I can do.

But wh-when you're young especially, you should, you should seek counselors, and not too many of them, and those who trust you.

And, uh, in my case, uh, Jeff Thomas, I was a college student and he, he came to my dorm one day and said, "Uh, Derek, I'm supposed to be preaching in this little country church on Sunday afternoon, and there won't be a whole lot there." Actually, there were th-three people there.

"And, um, I can't do it, but I want you to do it." You know, this was like Thursday, so I've got two days to prepare my first sermon.

And I went out there, Rosemary came with me, and there were three there, plus Rosemary, and, and one was the organist wh-who sat behind me.

And the greater your sense of who He is now and your attachment to Him detaches you from the super glue of this world and prepares you for the world to come when we'll see Him and thankfully be made more like Him than we are just now.

So what is truth? The Bible is truth.

In a world that's at sea, a world that's tossing from this side to the next, you and I, when we hold a Bible in our hands, when we open it and read it, when we hear the Word of God being read and expounded, we have an answer to the question, what is truth? Truth is every jot and tittle from Genesis 1.1 to the close of Revelation 22.

It's true.

It is absolutely true.

Right now, though, here's Dr. Derek Thomas answering the crucial question, what is truth?

What is truth? Well, it's today's question, isn't it? The trajectory from the Enlightenment to our own current time that truth, if there is such a thing as truth, cannot be known.

In Kant's language, Immanuel Kant's language, that the phenomena of the world in which we live cannot penetrate into the noumena where truth exists.

And so we've grown up in a world, you and I, where we've employed terms like postmodernity, where truth cannot be known, a world of relativism and subjectivism to questions in latter years, unable to define what a woman is.

At Ligonier's national conference, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Thomas to talk about his teaching series, Who Are They? And I began by asking him what led him to focus on these lesser-known people in scripture.

I've been in ministry for 45 years and more.

I'm now retired from full-time ministry.

And in almost all of that time, I've engaged in lectio continua preaching.

That is preaching through books of the Bible, beginning at, you know, chapter 1, verse 1, and heading all the way to the end.

And some series have been short and some have been longer.

And I've also been involved in ministry that included a morning, evening, and a Wednesday slot.

Tell us why Jethro is important.

It's quite staggering, isn't it? When Jesus rose from the dead, He had me in mind, and He had my salvation in mind.

And eventually, I would be born, and eventually, the Holy Spirit would regenerate me and make existentially true what was actually true when Jesus rose from the dead.

Thomas now.

Welcome back to our studies in Romans 8, the greatest chapter in the Bible.

And we're going to look at verses 9 through 11.

But before we do that, I want to go back to verse 8 because, surprising as this may sound, verse 9 follows verse 8, [laughs] uh, in more ways than one.

And verse 8 says, "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." And that's one of those definitive statements that you find in the Bible.

Those who are in the flesh, those who are in Adam, those who are still dead in trespasses and in sins, those who are not born again, those who are not in union with Christ, those who have not been buried with Christ and raised with Christ and who now sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, those who are in the flesh.

Here's Dr. Derek Thomas.

We continue in our studies of Romans 8, and we're going to look at verses five, six, and seven.

Beginning at verse five, "Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot." And the question that's being asked here as a consequence of where this chapter began with a statement that we are no longer condemned.

Being justified by faith, we have peace with God, and there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

The question now arises, and Paul has already hinted at it by referring to the law of the Spirit of life having set us free in Jesus Christ from the law of sin and death.

[laughs]

The gospel is more than just Jesus died on the cross for me.

The gospel is Trinitarian in origin and shape.

And the contours of the gospel, as Paul describes it here, is a Trinitarian one involving the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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To begin our journey in Romans chapter 8, here's Dr. Thomas.

We are going to walk through together the eighth chapter of Romans.

I preached a series on this and once called it, uh, the best chapter in the Bible.

And then a deacon came to ...

Dr. Thomas, since man is totally depraved, why do we read in the Bible that Satan blinds the minds of unbelievers?

Yes, this is a good question.

It assumes a number of things.

First of all, that the natural man, the unconverted man, by nature is totally depraved.

Not that he's as sinful as he possibly can be, but that there is no aspect of his being that isn't in some way tainted and marred by sin, and some more than others.

So there are degrees of that total depravity in its effect upon the natural man.

Total depravity then implies spiritual inability, that the natural man is unable by nature and by his own volition and natural abilities to choose all the good that there is, or to choose to be saved, or to choose to believe on Christ.