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 the 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, all-present, all-knowing, all, 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 tackle the tough age-old question of why it is that

God allows suffering, especially in the lives of his people.

I have to confess that it wasn't until we studied through the books of Job and then Psalms,

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