All right. Well, good evening and welcome to our midweek Bible study. Before we get started,

I want to show you something, and I need to sort of set the stage here a little bit.

You know, I often from the pulpit talk about how amazing

this church is and how loving this church is and how much of a privilege that it is mine to be

a pastor of such a loving church. Well, a couple weeks ago, I made a comment.

I was more than once about how much I missed everyone. And so I want to show you what kind of a church

this is pictured here are pictures of the people in our church

that sent in their photos along with scriptures and just in words of encouragement. And you can't see it from

the picture, but on the backside of a lot of the photos and the signs are words of encouragement

for the AV team as well. So it's like the next best thing. I was actually

thinking that, and I was a little bit reluctant, because we have 300 seats here in this sanctuary.

And my concern was, is if everyone sent in a picture, we would not have enough

seats to put the picture on. So I did want to at the very least say thank you to all of you

for your encouragement. Yes, I know you miss being here and you are so missed being here.

And Lord willing, and we're praying to this end, we won't need to have these pictures here too much longer.

Lord willing, you'll be here back here sometime soon.

So let's agree to pray to that end. All right, let's get to it. I want to talk to you tonight

about a very difficult topic concerning why it is that God allows that which

we're experiencing in the world today. Certainly God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present.

And certainly he could have stopped this or not allowed this to continue as it has.

But God in his sovereignty has deemed it fit and allowed what we're

experiencing to take place, and that's what I want to talk about tonight. Actually, we're going to

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