Human Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

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Speaker: Steve Estes
Scripture: Various Passages
January 12, 2025

Sermon Notes

Introduction

  • Where is God when we suffer?

  • The story of Rabbi Harold Kushner

  • Many evangelicals are like Rabbi Kushner

  • Some people take the opposite view

2. The causes behind suffering in the Book of Job

  • What caused Job’s troubles?

  • God governs nature and its laws

  • God governs both intentional and unintentional actions of people

  • God governs Satan and demons

3. An objection...and two answers

  • The objection

  • God is drawn to suffering people

  • God’s motives for decreeing evil are good

4. Summary

  • What about suffering is God sovereign over?

  • For what purpose?

Steve Estes

Steve Estes has been senior pastor at Brick Lane Community Church in Elverson, Pennsylvania, for over thirty-five years. 

Steve’s books and other writings began with his longtime friendship with Joni Eareckson Tada. As teenagers, they grappled with why God allowed Joni’s paralysis in a swimming accident in the Chesapeake Bay. Steve left for college . . . they kept in touch . . . she liked the style of his letters. When her 1976 autobiography Joni spawned thousands of reader responses, she asked Steve to join her in crafting a follow-up. The result was A Step Further in 1978.

Later, Wycliffe Bible Translators commissioned Steve to write the biography of former college friend Chet Bitterman, a Wycliffe linguist who was kidnapped and murdered by political terrorists in Colombia in 1981. Other books and articles followed, including When God Weeps (with Joni) and A Better December (a giveaway book for non-Christian friends at Christmas.)

Steve was educated at Westminster Theological Seminary, Columbia Bible College and Jerusalem University College in Israel. He has taught homiletics at Westminster and is a board member of the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation.

But Steve would say his most significant life achievement was persuading college classmate Verna Stoltzfus to marry him in 1974.  They now have eight children and more grandchildren than can fit in a van.

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The Christian’s Eternal Rest Adapted from Richard Baxter (1640)