God is not in the business of fulfilling evil, selfish, self-indulgent desires.

What the gospel does promise is salvation for the guilty and the fearful and the threatened

who have come to grips with their sin and the judgment of God and desperately want deliverance.

Welcome to Grace to you with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. In his best-selling

book on suffering, Rabbi Harold Kushner argues that God wants

good people to experience only happiness, but sometimes, quote, even God can't bring that about.

It's too difficult, even for God, to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims.

Well, what do you think?

Is God in complete control of everything?

Or is he lacking something?

Maybe power or information or wisdom, something that would help him stop evil?

Those are some of the questions John MacArthur is going to answer in his

study called, Consider this, addressing misconceptions of God and his character. John, the notion of

understanding God and his character, that sounds kind of basic, but like so many so-called

basic truths, people probably tend to

overlook them, and being reminded about these doctrines is important. So talk about that for a

minute. Yeah, the attributes of God are all the characteristics of Christ, aren't they? And to be

like Christ is to be like God. That's what

godly means. We need to understand that there is a direct connection between our knowledge of

God's nature, God's character, God's will, God's acts, God's purposes. There is a direct

connection between those and our spiritual growth. The more you know about God, the more you know

what God is like, the more you understand what it is to be like him.

...