But tonight we'll be continuing our study in the Westminster Confession of Faith, still working through chapter two, which is probably the most meaty and intense of the chapters. And this is our fourth lesson in chapter two. So last week we discussed how God is immense, eternal, and incomprehensible. And then tonight we're gonna just continue on and we're gonna talk about how God is almighty, most wise and how he works all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory. So covering a little bit more ground in regard to words than we have the past two weeks. So we're just going to go through each of these things kind of one by one. Almighty, most wise, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable most righteous will for his own glory. So first off, God is almighty. The Westminster Divine cited two proof texts for here. First, they said Genesis 17, one. And when Abram was 90 years old and nine, the Lord Yahweh appeared to Abram and said unto him, I am the almighty God. Walk before me and be thou perfect. And then Revelation 4 and verse 8, And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him, and they were full of eyes within, and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come. So there's a lot of places in scripture where we see God being described as almighty. And here in Revelation, it's him being praised. And in Genesis, it's him revealing himself in that way. The word almighty is not terribly difficult for us to grasp in the same way certain words that the confession uses are, like immutable. That's a tough one. But almighty, I think we have a general idea. Another way of saying that God is almighty would be to say that God is all powerful. Or the fancier word for that would be that God is omnipotent, but it means the exact same thing. And a lot of things that we've discussed actually in our previous meetings about the other attributes of God could just be brought up here as well to describe why God is almighty. These attributes, they're not distinct and isolated. They all bleed together because remember, God is not composed of parts. All of God is almighty. All of God is immutable. All of God is infinite. But we discussed how God is immense. And so he measured out all the waters of the earth in the hollow of his hand. And it's easy to see that God would have to be very immense to do that, but he would also, of course, have to be almighty to do that. Because even if he was an infinite size, if he was weak, if he wasn't of infinite strength, how could he hold all the waters of the earth in his hand or weigh out the mountains in a scale? So we see that we're seeing multiple attributes of God in that description. And creation is, we talk about mountains and waters, creation is a large, vista by which we can see how God is almighty. The book of the Bible where God being described as almighty comes up, where it comes up most commonly is the book of Job. Job is where we see the word, where the title God Almighty appears most frequently, more than any other book of the Bible. And I think especially we see God's almighty power in those whirlwind speeches that we've been reading in our Old Testament lesson for the past few weeks. I just drew out a couple phrases from there that I think really described this well. So God has appeared to Job out of the whirlwind and he says, gird yourself like a man, now I'll question you and you'll answer me. Where were you, God says to Job, when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Obviously, you have to be almighty to lay the foundations of the earth. Or who shut the sea in with doors when it burst forth and issued from the womb? Where is the way to the dwelling of light? Have you entered the treasury of snow, or have you seen the treasury of hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? Who has divided a channel for the overflowing water or a path for the thunderbolt? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you set their dominion over the earth? Have you given the horse its strength? Have you clothed his neck with thunder? Can you draw out the Leviathan with a hook? These are I mean, the rhetorical answer to all of these is no, I can't do that, I'm a mere man. And Job was, of course, one of those powerful and the richest and the godliest man on earth. And the answer to all of these questions was no, I can't do any of these things. God can do these things. You can hear his almighty power just pouring through each of those three or four chapters of Job in a particularly amazing way. This is the God who, he speaks and his voice strips the forest bare. This is the God who, because of the blast of his nostrils, he gathered up all the waters of the Red Sea into a heap, only to let them crash down again on his enemies when his people had come safely through. This is an almighty God who exerts his almighty power over all of his physical creation. But Almighty isn't just describing His strength as it relates to the physical world, to the things we can see. That is a big way that we see that God's Almighty, but there's more to Him being Almighty. It's also His ability to accomplish His purposes and to save His people. He's mighty to save. When God established his covenant with Abraham, and that's the first proof text that the divines call on for this attribute of Almighty, that's the same covenant that we are all beneficiaries of today, that everlasting covenant that God made with our father in the faith, Abraham. When he established that, he revealed himself as God Almighty. And he did this on purpose. It wasn't by accident. He was using this name, God Almighty, to testify to the fact that he was the only one powerful enough to make, secure, and fulfill an everlasting covenant. A covenant that will endure forever and ever. And this covenant, of course, would involve the expansion of God's kingdom throughout the entire earth. It would involve the saving of each and every one of his people from their sins. And of course, the defeat of God's enemies and the enemies of his people forever. So his almighty powers on display in his covenant promises and in his covenant fulfillment. And we can see that very clearly, the ways that God shows us that he's fulfilling his covenant throughout the scriptures. He delivers his people from slavery in Egypt, from the greatest political or military might that could be imagined at that time. And it was effortless for God to deliver them to just crush all the enemies. He's almighty. He's stronger than the strongest nation. He fought the battles for the Israelites in the promised land. As they're overtaking the promised land, God said, I will go before you. The angel of the Lord said, I'm going to fight your battles for you. And you could hear him running in the treetops, and you could see him giving these seemingly impossible ways to defeat their enemies, like with Gideon and the 300 men defeating the great mighty foe, or how God sends the hornets. He just has almighty power over even insects. Perhaps hornet could mean something else, that's a different discussion, but he has almighty power to just send amazing and terrible judgments on the wicked. And then ultimately we see God fulfilling in an almighty way these covenant promises to Abraham by sending his own son. sending himself to become a man, to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death as a sin offering for us, to rise victorious and imperishable from the grave, something that's impossible and that no one else had ever done, to ascend into heaven, and then to sit down at the right hand of God the Father. That is almighty power. No one else, no one else could have ever done that. So God is an almighty God. Does anyone have any questions about what it means for God to be almighty? going along and naming these different parts of how His Almightyness is exhibited, it made me think of, and you said to do an eternal covenant, which is almost the same thing as what I was thinking in addition, which was that He upholds all things by the power of His Word. That's right. And in Him, all things hold together. That's right. We've said since our children were little, if God didn't sustain me, I would just absolutely he holds the creation Both the physical creation and the non-physical creation, the existence of our souls, our very being, that he upholds all of that just from moment to moment throughout the course of history. It's just, it boggles the mind. it does but stir my stuff yes yes please no that's very good that is absolutely right and and there are the great thing is we're going to come back to a lot of these themes later too because there's a chapter on you know providence and i'm sure we'll get to that in more depth but yeah that's a wonderful truth yes Yeah Well, I haven't studied it very well. It's unclear whether it says I don't read Hebrew really I mean I took two Hebrew classes, you know, but Yeah, well, two Hebrew classes is just enough to make you a heretic if you think you know Hebrew by that point. But I don't know if the original text actually says hornet or hornets. You know, there's manuscripts. Some say I will send the hornet and some say I will send hornets in our English Bibles. And I haven't studied it well, but I know there are people that think the hornet Could be maybe some type of terrible force that God sent, but not literal insects. Maybe even something supernatural or angelic. Or it could be that he just sent a swarm of bees. I mean, which would also be terrifying if you think of just millions and millions and millions of bees raining down on your enemies. That would, that would be truly terrifying too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what? Let's look into it together. I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to research that more. Yeah. Abby. That's right. Yes, that is true of him being almighty because, you know, death is a weakness to us. I mean, it's part of our being weak and frail and stained by sin. So someone infinitely strong would never die. That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about God not dying as being related to him being almighty. Yeah, there's other, I've encountered a couple people in my life have asked me the question, well, could God, if God's so almighty, could he create a rock so big that he couldn't lift? Has anyone heard that question before? Yeah, and so there are these little word tricks that atheists and skeptics like to play. like to try to trick us with. If you ever get encountered with that, because I was thinking about it as I was preparing this, the answer is, no, he could not create a rock so heavy he could not lift. It's a super easy answer. No, God couldn't do that. Because if he did that, that would be him showing himself not to be almighty. Because it's like saying, well, could God commit adultery? Or could God commit murder? No, God could not commit adultery. No, God could not murder because God can't do a lot of things. There's tons of things that God can't do. The reason is because God can't act contrary to his nature. This is not a limitation of God's power. God is infinite in his being and perfections, but to do any of these things, like create a rock so heavy you couldn't lift, is actually a reduction of his power. It would not be an expansion. So to limit God is not to limit his power. It's just a verbal way of saying, you know, God can't do things that God can't do. Doing more indifferent things doesn't necessarily make someone more powerful or mighty. In fact, doing more indifferent things could, in various spheres of our lives and in God's existence, make us weaker or less than. So the answer is no to the question, could God create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift? It'd be like saying, could God break his own law? He can't work contrary to his nature. Our next attribute that the confession lists is that God is most wise. So the divines who wrote the confession listed only one proof text for this one, though there could have been many more. They put Romans 16, 27, to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ forever, amen. So they're not really describing in that particular text, Paul isn't describing what wisdom is, but he is describing that God is the wise one. What does it mean for God to be most wise? It's related, of course, to God being all-knowing, but it's also distinct. So in paragraph two of the same chapter, we're in chapter two, paragraph one right now, but in paragraph two, the divines were going to say that God's knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature. So as nothing to him is contingent or uncertain. So they clearly say that God is the peak of intelligence. No one could ever be smarter than God. He is as smart as any being could ever possibly be and smarter. But here they say he's most wise. One theologian defines divine wisdom as, quote, that attribute of God, whereby he produces the best possible results with the best possible means. He produces the best possible results with the best possible means. So wisdom is inherently practical. Knowledge can be theoretical. It can be abstract. It can stay in your head. Wisdom flows out of your life. It's about what you do and how to apply your knowledge to certain situations and the best possible results. So if we take that definition, I think it's decent, but it could use some beefing up, if we take that definition that God's wisdom is his achieving the best possible results to the best possible means, we can also say, well, the best possible results are that which brings the most glory to him through ordering everything according to his eternal purposes. So I'm sure everyone's been here, but if you haven't, think about this. Have you ever been in a situation anything in life and you think, I just, I really don't know what to do here. I don't know what's best. Should I accept this invitation to this event or should I decline it? Should I pursue this career path or this career path? Should I marry this person or not marry this person? What should I spend my extra time on? There are so many times in life where we run into situations like these. And we have to think through, how are we going to proceed? There's not always a clear, absolutely defined next step in our lives from our perspective. And a lot of times, of course, we do know what to do and we have a good idea and we go forward. But sometimes you might have absolute certainty on something, but really be wrong about the certainty. And you look back and you think, wow, that was a big mistake I made. Or sometimes you just don't have certainty at all and you can't determine What's right? You've studied the matter, you've prayed over it, you've talked to people, you run all the possible hypothetical scenarios in your head, and you still just don't have certainty on what you're supposed to do. Well, that's what is called getting stuck in analysis paralysis. It's when you are just frozen because you don't know which way to go. Like you're standing out on a frozen lake and you've started to hear the cracks and you're just scared to death because you don't know which direction you're supposed to step. And if you step the wrong way, you're afraid you're going to die. Well, in this situation, a lot of times the best thing to do is just to make a decision. just to make a decision without certainty. Make a decision and trust God to use you for his glory, even if ultimately you chose something wrong, that you didn't obey him as you should have. You pick up your foot and you just start walking down a path. And as you do it, you thank God that your righteousness is not from you and your actions, but it's from him. You have an alien righteousness, the righteousness from someone else and you don't have to make all the right choices for him to love you and accept you. So that's just a reality of life that we sometimes live in. I think it might have been related to a Harry Truman biography. Another pastor was telling me something about Truman and apparently Truman said, according to this guy, that it's the president's job to decide. There's a lot of people that talk about problems. John, you've seen this in business. I think probably everyone's seen it. Parents have seen this. People like to talk about problems and sometimes just pull their ignorance or just talk about neat theoretical solutions. But at the end of the day, someone has to just decide, make a decision. The president's job to decide. But this is an experience that everyone goes through, but God never ever finds himself in these situations. Why is that? It's because God is most wise. He never, gets into a situation and doesn't know what to do. That's absurd. God always knows what the right thing to do is. He never is up in heaven wringing his hands thinking, ah, I'm just unsure how to proceed with upholding the world. I don't know how to direct the path of my creatures anymore. He sees every possible outcome of every situation that could ever be conceived and he chooses to ordain and decree and provide for and uphold the right path every single time without fail. Every single time. That's because God is most wise. That's his wisdom on display in ordering the heavens and the earth for his glory. He is, as the confession states, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory. He's not arbitrarily deciding things in the sense that there are no reasons. He has more reasons than he can ever need because he's consulted his own will, which is perfect, it's immutable, it's most righteous. God cannot change. We've discussed that he's an unchangeable God. And also because of that, his will cannot change. He's most wise and therefore his will, that's his decided plan for all things, his will is also most wise. And as God himself is most righteous, so also his will is most righteous because God will not act contrary to his will. God having a righteous will refers to God always doing the good, right, and just thing. He'll always act in accord with righteousness because he is righteousness. And righteousness is a reflection of his nature. He'll always work all things for his glory, for his own glory, because it would be a sin to do anything apart from seeking to glorify God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, which the divines wrote as a way of easily teaching the doctrines that they laid out in the confession, it opens with a very famous question. What is the chief end of man? Does anyone want to answer that one? Becca? That's right. That's right. Did you want to answer it too, Benjamin? That's right, that's right. So y'all all got it right. So man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That's what we're here for. People ask all the world over, no matter what culture or time or religion you come from, everyone asks, what are we here for? Why do I exist? What's my purpose? This is it, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That's what life's all about because that is the highest and greatest goal that could ever be aimed at or achieved. And that is the same goal which God is accomplishing. This isn't just something for human beings and then God has a different goal in mind. It's the same goal that he's accomplishing. God is actively working toward the same thing he is calling us to, we are being drawn up into his mission. God is working toward glorifying himself and enjoying himself. God exists first and foremost by and for himself. He does not exist because of or for anyone else. Think of Eve, Eve was created for someone else, for Adam. Adam was created for someone else, for the glory of God. God is uncreated, he exists for no one but himself. That's why he's here, he's here for himself. Now he does pursue the good of his creation generally and the good of his people in particular. He does give us good gifts. He delights to honor us even to honor his creatures and show us undeserved favor and loving kindness. But none of these good things that God does for his creatures are separate from him seeking his own glory. They're actually downstream. from him seeking his own glory. God is glorifying himself when he loves others. He's glorifying himself when he redeems his people from their bondage to sin. So no matter what God does, he's always glorifying himself. The proof texts that the divine site here are first Ephesians 1.11, which they quote almost word for word. That's where the apostle Paul says that in him, we've also obtained an inheritance being predestined according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. And then they also provide Proverbs 16.4 and Romans 11.36. Proverbs 16 says that the Lord Yahweh hath made all things for himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. And then Romans 11, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever, amen. So even wicked people and wicked actions, God ultimately uses and works for his own glory and the good of his own people. This is a question that I'd love to have some answers on. How does God work wicked people and wicked actions for his own glory? How does God use wicked people and wicked actions for his own glory? Absolutely. We see that all the time in the Bible. God raises up a pagan wicked nation to discipline his disobedient children. That's right. Lizzie, did you have one? Oh, same thing. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's a big, that's a big thing. It's important. Anything else? Another way that God uses or works wicked people and wicked actions for his glory. He's glorified in their judgment. Absolutely. That's what Romans 9 tells us. That God is glorified through the judgment, through the condemnation of the wicked. That brings him glory because it puts his justice on display. That God is not one who just looks over iniquity. Yes, Abby. Yeah, that's right. God could use one set of wicked people to kill another set of wicked people. That's true. Yeah, that is true. God uses evil people and evil actions all the time throughout scripture and throughout the world. I think the ultimate example of this that we see in scripture is that God used what he calls lawless men and the evil of murder by a tyrannical state to bring about the redemption of the world. I think that's the chief example of how God turns and uses wickedness, wicked people and wicked actions to glorify himself. Because at the hands of lawless men, Jesus was put to death. And of course he was not guilty of what he was charged with. They thought he was a blasphemer. They thought he was seditious against the state. but God used that to save the world. I had an example of this actually come up yesterday around lunchtime. I was over at App with the Students for Life group and they had a table set up and they were inviting people to their event last night and I was talking to a bunch of people and someone asked me something about what happens if a woman gets pregnant by rape or incest and It was a really good conversation we got to have. And I was talking to the guy and I said, well, an unplanned pregnancy is in a sense, the only good thing that can come from extramarital sex, or at least the only good physical thing that can come from that. The physical pleasure is not good. It's actually evil because regardless of how the forbidden fruit might taste at the time, it ends up in nothing but bitterness and sorrow. It's a deceptive taste of poison, like how antifreeze used to taste sweet so dogs would lap it up and drink it and they had to change the way the antifreeze tasted so all the dogs wouldn't keep being killed. They were deceived by the taste of that. You didn't even notice the taste change? Yeah, so it can be, you know, there can be sins that have a deceptively sweet taste that end in poison. Other things that you think might be good things if you're in that situation and you want to be intimate with someone, the nearness to a boyfriend or a girlfriend, whomever it is, that bond that you're making with that person when you commit that act is not a bond being cemented through a holy covenant, but it's a bond being cemented through sin. through adultery. And so that's not a good union to create or strengthen. Of course, there's STDs, there's harm to your body if there's violence that's occurred like rape. And so we're talking through all these things. There's increased guilt because you've been breaking God's commands. You've been going contrary to the way that God has ordered the world. There's shame. There's also sociological things that Maybe they don't come from a direct verse of the Bible, but they're still good to bring up. You know, if you have premarital sex, it's statistically more likely that you'll get divorced than if you abstain before marriage. You're training your body and your mind to think in actions that are not ordered to God's word and ways. So all these fruits of intimacy outside of marriage are bad fruits. So we have a bad fruit situation going here. Well, how could a good fruit come from something that's so bad? Doesn't Jesus say, if the tree's bad, it can only make bad fruits. If the tree's good, it can only make good fruits. But we also see that having a child is a very good thing, even if the circumstances surrounding the child's conception are not godly. And there are scriptural examples of this exact thing. So for instance, God formed the 12 tribes of Israel out of a very unhealthy polygamous relationship between a man and four different women. And it's not like they were happily four women and a man together. They were bickering and fighting. There was deception involved. There was covetousness. There was vanity. There was, of course, just flat out adultery. But God ultimately used this very sinful situation for his glory by establishing and saving his people through Jacob's children. And God willed that all four of those women would each have certain particular children that would have a role to play in the salvation of his people. For example, one of those children was Judah, who is the ancestor of Jesus. That's pretty important. And that's not even the intended, Judah was not even the child of the intended wife of Jacob, but Joseph was. And Joseph, of course, saved God's people from starvation by bringing them to Egypt. So we see this exact example in scripture. In fact, Judah goes on. There's another example of Judah being involved in something like this when he... lies with Tamar, and then that's his daughter-in-law. But then Tamar gives birth to Perez, who is also an ancestor of Christ, who's listed in Matthew's genealogy. So we see, I was talking to this guy and he had these questions. He said, well, how could it be, how could a child be good if it's conceived in a bad circumstance? And so I took him to these examples in the Bible, and actually I think it was compelling to him. But yes, so God can use and work and turn the evil actions and evil people themselves to glorify himself and benefit his people. And we might think then, well, how could God will something to happen if his will's immutable, how could he will something to come to pass that's contrary to his revealed law? That's a very good question. We're gonna have to wait until we get to chapter five, because that's where it goes into that in detail. So you just have to hold on for that one for a little bit longer. And I want us to just, as we get near our close here, I want to reflect on how Jesus himself is the wisdom of God, as scripture tells us. 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says that Jesus is the wisdom of God. And then Jesus himself in Matthew 11, says, the son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners, but wisdom is justified by her children. And Christ here is referring to himself as wisdom. He's the wisdom of God. Proverbs chapter eight speaks of wisdom in this way. Actually, I wanna, I'll read a large section. A few more verses than I have here. Proverbs chapter eight. The Lord Yahweh possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there was ever an earth. When there were no depths, I was brought forth. When there were no fountains abounding with water, before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth. While as yet He had not made the earth of the fields or the primal dust of the world, When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He drew a circle on the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above, when He strengthened the foundations of the deep, when He assigned to the sea its limit so that the waters would not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside Him as a master craftsman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men. That's Christ speaking there as wisdom personified. And earlier in that chapter, the first several verses are Solomon describing wisdom. Puritan writer, John Gill says that this chapter is speaking of Jesus himself under the name of wisdom. Charles Bridges was a 19th century Anglican pastor who was just directly in line with the Puritans. He says that lady wisdom in Proverbs is the voice of the Son of God when she's calling in the streets. Matthew Henry says the same thing, that Jesus is speaking of himself and he's the one crying out aloud in Proverbs 8. So just as Christ is the way and the truth and the life, he's also the wisdom. Wisdom is walking in the way of God, in light of and in obedience to the truth of God and empowered by the everlasting life of God. God by wisdom created the world. It's perfectly in line with John chapter one. It says, all things were made through him and without him, nothing was made that was made. And Colossians one, for by him, all things were created. But I go into that depth to establish that this really is talking about Jesus because it seems confusing for us perhaps that this would be Jesus because Solomon describes wisdom here as a woman. He describes her as lady wisdom. But why would we say that this is Jesus if this is a lady? I admit this is a tough question. I'm gonna give a couple answers here. I think there are at least three reasons why wisdom is referred to as she and as lady, even though wisdom is Christ himself. First, wisdom is contrasted with folly here. And folly is personified as a prostitute. In our flesh, that's what we seek. We seek folly, uselessness, lack of wisdom. We seek the prostitute. That's what our flesh wants. But if we're being transformed by the renewal of our minds, then we'll begin not to desire the prostitute, but to desire the noble and godly and modest lady wisdom. So to counter the prostitute, Wisdom is presented here as a dignified lady. I think that's one reason Solomon warns I think for good reason for the mistakes. He known he has known that he's made in his life He warns those that will later be reading his Proverbs his sons and his descendants against pursuing that same folly that he pursued So he says instead of this that I know your fleshly Heart wants this prostitute. I want you to pursue lady wisdom his first reason second The second reason I think that wisdom is referred to as a she, this is really simple. It's not theological at all. But the thing is that the word wisdom is grammatically feminine in the Hebrew language. So in many languages, words have gender. We don't really have that in English much. We don't have a gendered language. And when I say gendered, it's just a grammatical construct. It doesn't actually have to relate to the essence of the word, the meaning of the word itself. Sometimes in fact, the gender of a certain word seems opposite of what the word's meaning is. So for example, in Spanish, a tie that a man would wear, it's a distinctively masculine thing, is corbata. That's a feminine word. I don't know why that is, but it's the case. There's a lot of them. For a woman's dress in Spanish, a distinctively feminine thing that she would wear, a dress is vestido, and that's masculine. The word's masculine. So sometimes it seems like the grammatical gender has no relationship to a sexual gender or biological identity. So that could be another reason. Wisdom is feminine. There's no doubt about that. The grammatical construct of it is a feminine form. And then finally, the last reason, and this is the, to our feeble minds, this is the trickiest and the one that might scare us a little bit as we're thinking about it. The final reason is that even though God has revealed himself as father and the Bible describes God in primarily masculine terms, we have to remember that God is not actually a man. Like we are, God's not a man. God does not have biological sex like we do. That's right, he's a spirit, he's different. And there are things about women that actually can display God in ways that men typically can't or don't display certain things about God. For example, God says in his word that he will avenge his people like a mother bear avenges her cubs when they're taken away. And we can see that, you know, I've seen videos of it. If you get between a mother bear and her cubs, the father bear, he's not as interested. The mother bear will attack like crazy. or that Jesus himself says he longs to gather his children like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. So God is father, God is son. He's described most commonly and appropriately in masculine terms. And Jesus, of course, is a man. Jesus is not a woman. He will never be a woman. He can never be a woman. He's the second Adam. He's fulfilling that role as our federal head. But there are times where God's word describes God with what are normally feminine characteristics or with feminine metaphors. And we can't be afraid of God's word. And we can't be afraid of describing God when his word warrants it in those ways. So I think those three reasons are why we see wisdom is a lady and wisdom is also Jesus Christ. It's a tricky one, but I think that's the answer. Any questions about God being most wise or working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will? Or any other just interesting thoughts maybe about the lady wisdom question that I found really intriguing? Yes. In Genesis, It says, let us make man in our image, male and female, he created them, and he created man. So man is male and female together, created in the image of God. So God has masculine attributes and feminine attributes, but we speak of him as a man because those are the headship governmental attributes of his being, I guess. Yes. I mean, we know that from the reflection of his image in us, in male and female, but neither male nor female, it seems, you know, we're both made in the image of God, but we reflect him differently in some ways. Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's a good point. Very much. I think it relates to how a father and a mother have children, and you get your idea, first, of who God is from how your parents treat you and raise you, in a sense. You get the idea of an authority above you, and things more easily go haywire when there's only one parent. God begets. He can create children, and of course, God the Father begets the Son, but then us being made in His image, we need two of us to beget, a man and a woman. Yes, Benjamin. That's right. Yeah, you were listening. Very good. And I think one thing that we want to be careful of, though, is you know, everything you said was true, but you also want to balance that God created man in his image, and man there means humanity, the human race, with Paul saying that men, biological men are created in the image of God, biological women are created in the image of man. So there's a derivative aspect of the feminine the feminine side of humanity, there's a way that in a more derivative way reflects the image of God, whereas the man reflects in a more primary sense. So it's not that women are ontologically inferior, but there's just this derivative glory, because man is the image and glory of God. Woman is the image and glory of man. So we don't want to flatten out, you know, and I know you're not doing this, but we don't want to flatten out and think, well, okay, God's, you know, okay, 50% masculine characteristics, 50% feminine characteristics. God doesn't have biological sex. I think there would probably be problems if we ran down that road too far. Anything else, responses, questions, comments? Do you think that's how certain versions of the newer NIV Bibles started coming out where they didn't really, they sort of like stopped identifying God as male, they changed a bunch of the words in there? Yeah. Was it that line of thinking that led there or was it something else? Yeah, it was an overemphasis I think on that, you know, in Christ there is neither male nor female and that, yeah, we're just all kind of the same, this bland sameness. I do know a little bit about the translation history for some of those modern translations. The NIV wasn't the first. It was just got a lot of flack because the NIV was the most commonly used Bible among evangelicals. I don't know, I mean, the King James was still the most commonly sold, but in the more non-fundamentalist camp, the NIV had ascendancy, but yeah, it started way before that. The NRSV before it and the RSV before that all started to make these errors where they started to neutralize certain words in scripture. We can even see it in some of our quote, more conservative type translations, like the NASV and the ESV don't, render the Hebrew word seed as seed. They render it as descendants, which actually has downstream theological implications also because, you know, it was the seed of woman, you know, that came to conquer the seed of the serpent. And I think there is this tendency to placate and neutralize and kind of remove certain distinctions. But I think it's important to remember that what John said, man in Genesis is God made man is gender neutral. There is a gender neutral in English. It's man, it's he, it's him. And I think people have just been afraid of that. There are some legitimate, like, I don't want to go off on too many rabbit trails, but so for instance, in Greek, the word Adelphoi means womb sharer. but it really means brother, okay? It doesn't mean twin, necessarily. You could be a twin, you know? This is where, like, our word Philadelphia is city of brotherly love. Well, no one's arguing to change all the signs in Philadelphia to city of sibling love or city of brotherly and sisterly love because we know that's silly. Someone is now, okay? But the NIV 2011 and the NRSV, they changed all the instances, well, I know they changed many. I'm not certain if they changed all. They changed all the emphasis where like Adelphi would come up. In the older Bibles, like in the ESV or the King James or something, it's rendered brothers, you know, but in all those it says brothers and sisters. But it does really get into some problems. At a certain point, you really start hitting some big theological problems. For instance, The concept of calling all Christians by a masculine name actually communicates a lot of theological weight. For example, when Paul says we're adopted as sons, what he means is we receive the inheritance of sons. But if you change that to children, that's a big difference because daughters don't get an inheritance in the biblical perspective, not the same way that a son would. You know, a son receives the massive weight of the inheritance, not because we're being unkind to women, but because the daughter is going to marry another son who receives the inheritance. And so the daughter's always seen as being cared for by a man, even into her adulthood. But when we start to smooth that out and get rid of, oh, you've been adopted as children of God, or you've been adopted, which the Bible says also, but I think Paul's driving something when he's laying out his doctrine of adoption. So I think that brothers, sisters, that men, women, that sons, daughters, I think it ends up having some pretty serious theological problems downstream. And there's no biblical reason to do it. Even if brothers and sisters were just as legitimate as brothers, for instance, the reason they're doing it is because they're trying to placate the feminist left. That's absolutely what's happening. It's the evangelical feminism just creeping into Bible translation. And any agenda, even a conservative agenda, would be bad, in a sense, because you want to be a slave to the word and not bring any particular agenda to the table when you're translating. The pastor interprets and applies. The translator shouldn't be doing that as far as he's able. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Any final questions or thoughts? All right. Well, let's go ahead and take up any prayer requests that we have.