23, Exodus chapter 10, verses 21 through 23. Excuse me. I have to apologize in advance. If I make disgusting noises while I'm preaching, I am so sorry. I'm trying really hard not to. So please forgive me. Exodus chapter 10 verses 21 through 23, this is God's word. Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hand toward heaven that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days. They did not see one another. Nor did anyone rise from his place for three days. But all the people of Israel had light where they lived. Let's pray. Our God, make your light shine on us today. For we are men and women who have lived in the darkness and who live in a dark world. If you do not enlighten us, then we will not see. Our God, it is you who lightens our darkness. It is you who makes a lamp for our feet. It is you who have shined on a land that dwelt in darkness and under the shadow of death, you have shone on us. So shine on us again, that we might know you better. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. The plagues on Egypt are all fascinating. And as I mentioned when we first started into the plagues, there's nine plagues that come in three groups of three, three cycles of three plagues each. First you have the Nile turn to blood, all of the fish die, and then frogs and then gnats, that's cycle number one. And the cycles are defined by, first Moses goes to confront Pharaoh by the river. That's the first plague of each cycle, so plagues one, four, and seven. The second plague of each cycle has Moses confronting Pharaoh in his palace, in his courtroom. The third plague of each cycle is no warning. There's no confrontation, there's no demand, it's just boom, here comes the plague. That's the gnats, the boils, and the darkness. Now some of these plagues obviously seem a lot worse than others. Having the entire river system of Egypt turn to blood and all of the fish dying in it, that's a pretty big deal. Having a bunch of frogs everywhere, frustrating, inconvenient, stinky, annoying, not necessarily deadly. Boils on man and beast, painful. Plague on Egyptian livestock, dangerous. Biting flies, again, frustrating, painful, inconvenient, not necessarily death. But when you come to the last cycle of plagues, plagues seven, eight, and nine, the intensity just gets ratcheted up. First you have hail, and the fiery hail demolishes all of the crops that were about to be harvested, all of the barley and the spelt. It kills any animals or men that are in the field. Fire and flood, rain, wind, terrible things, absolutely destructive. Followed by every agricultural society's worst nightmare, a plague of locusts that descends on the ground and consumes everything in sight. That is also deadly. Now there's no harvest in Egypt, there's no green food. The locusts don't stick around very long, so there's not even any or very many dead locusts that you can eat. It's just the food is all gone. But the ninth plague seems somewhat anticlimactic. You've had death followed by death, and then God just turns off the lights. Again, inconvenient. but not deadly. Why is darkness the penultimate plague? Why is darkness the second to last? And the one that most comes close to breaking Pharaoh. So that after three days of darkness, Pharaoh calls Moses in and says, all right, fine, just leave. But leave your animals. Everybody can leave, you've been wanting the whole families to leave, just leave your flocks and your herds and then you can all get out of here. Why is darkness so bad? Well first, this is, it's described as a darkness to be felt. And you might wonder, what on earth does that mean? Does that mean there's like substance to the darkness, perhaps? The idea in Hebrew is it's a darkness that is so dark people have to grope around in it. And maybe you've been in darkness that deep. To experience darkness like this, probably the closest we could get to it would be to go into one of those lava caves in northern Oregon. Go deep down in and then turn off all the lights. You can't see anything. There's no bioluminescence down there, there's no starlight, there's no, there's just nothing, it's just dark. There's no light at all. And you really do have to, have to grope around. You have to kind of feel your way, you're kind of feeling along with your feet, you're feeling with your hands because you don't want to, you don't want to knock your head into something and you don't want to knock your shins into something. So you feel your way around, you grope your way around. But it's also described as pitch darkness and that's a very interesting expression because in Hebrew it's just two different Hebrew words for darkness together. It's dark darkness. A darkness of calamity is one way that you could translate it. This is a darkness thicker than night. See when it's night, The moon shines most nights, unless it's a new moon. You have starlight. This is thicker than that, darker than that. And remember, this is a world with no light pollution. There's no LEDs, there's no incandescent bulbs, there's no street lights, nothing like that. We think darkness isn't as big a deal today. We can travel anytime we want. We can drive around the clock if we wish because we have nice bright LED light bulbs on our trucks and our cars. We can go anywhere we want. In the ancient world, the only way you could travel at night in the dark is if there were stars or the moon shining and if your animals knew the way really, really well. Because you couldn't see far enough ahead to know what was coming. Not only that, but you had the danger of robbers and thieves and things like that. It was just too dangerous. You couldn't see where you were going and you couldn't see what was waiting for you. So this is really dark. It lasts for three days, that's frightening. But there's more descriptions of it. Verse 23, they did not see each other. That's very interesting because when it's really dark, you know what you can do? You can just light a candle, right? Light a lamp. In those days, that was the main source of light after dark was candles, lamps, torches, the light of fire. They did not see one another nor did anyone rise from his place for three days. That's also a very interesting expression. Literally it says no one could rise up from under the darkness. The idea is nobody could dissipate it. Nobody can make the darkness go away, nobody can push it back. Now that implies, that could rather imply two different possibilities. Possibility number one, maybe they could not light. lamps or candles. Maybe they couldn't find the materials in the dark to be able to light the lamps or candles. Or maybe God denied them even the light of fire. Maybe it was one of those things where you're scraping the flint and the steel and it's just not taken. You're not even getting a spark. You try to light the match and it just won't go. Some of you have experienced that. You're trying to, you know, the strike anywhere matches and you strike it anywhere and it still won't turn on. It's kind of frustrating. Maybe it was something like that. Or maybe It was more than just darkness, maybe the darkness to be felt includes the idea of haze in the darkness. To be in the dark when it's foggy is a lot worse than just being in the dark. Because fog dissipates the light. The first time I went into a training building with fake smoke for firefighting training, it was trippy. I turned on my lights and I could not see anything. because the smoke immediately dissipated every light beam. These are bright lights. These are bright LEDs outside. They work great inside. They do not help. Sometimes they make it worse. No matter what they tried to do, they could not make the darkness go away. Only Israel had light in their houses and communities. All the people of Israel had light where they lived. And that tells you this isn't just a sandstorm. One of the arguments that people bring, one of the naturalistic explanations for the plagues is that this is just a camson, which is a southern wind that comes up from the Sahara, blows giant dust storm and settles over Egypt for a few hours and makes it hard to see. A few years ago, we were visiting some friends out in Soap Lake, spending the night there, and there was a great big wildfire up north of Soap Lake. and the wind blew the smoke right down over their house and it was amazing because one minute you looked out and you could see the smoke pillar, the next minute you look outside and you can't see anything because the smoke was blowing right over the house. This is not like that, a natural kind of thing that indiscriminately darkens everywhere. This is discriminates It darkens Egypt and Egyptians, but only Egypt and Egyptians. It does not darken the Israelites. Jesus said in Matthew chapter five verse 45, God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good. Almost universally, but not here. Here the sun rises no longer on the evil of Egypt and this is calamitous for Egypt. A humiliation for Egypt's priests and gods and for Pharaoh. Pharaoh's primary responsibility as the king of Egypt but also as the representative of the Egyptian gods is to preserve the cosmic order. In Egyptian the word was Mayot. His job was to maintain balance. And that's why Egyptian society was extremely stratified, a very strict caste system. Anybody trying to leave their caste and move up or down would be just hammered. You don't do that, we maintain balance. And that was the case across the board. Pharaoh's job is to preserve that, to preserve this cosmic order, which depends on the right relationship of the people to the king, of the nation to the gods, and of the gods to each other. Over 1,500 gods have been identified so far in Egyptian texts that were worshiped in different ways. That's a lot of gods. Each god had his own domain, each god had his own wheelhouse, so to speak. There were gods of health and wealth, gods of war and chaos, death and funerals, fertility, crops, you name it, there was a god for it. In the plagues, the power of the gods in every realm of creation is confronted and destroyed. First, the river gods, the source of Egypt's life, are slain, and the river flows with blood. The river gods are paralyzed, the gods of fertility are made a laughing stock, first with the hail, with the locusts, with the plagues on livestock, with the gnats. The gods of health and healing are routed as boils erupt on people and disease spreads among the nation. The gods of health and wealth and healing are routed. The gods of weather are devastated. But so far, through all of the plagues, one god has continued to reign. in Egypt, every morning he rises and every evening he sets. The sun, Ra, which is just the Egyptian word for sun, has continued to prove to the Egyptian people each day that he had not been defeated, that the chief god of the Egyptians was a match for the god of the Hebrews. The Book of the Dead puts it like this, I am he among the gods who cannot be repulsed. Who is he? He is Ra when he arises on the eastern horizon of heaven. Ra was the king of the gods. He was the greatest of the gods. He was understood to be the god of creation, the god who created himself first after the time and matter had come into existence. Ra just burst into existence and then creates everything else. He is the greatest of the gods, the most powerful. And he rules from his great barge, the sun disk, which was also called the Aten. He sails it through the skies each day. When the sun sets, he sails his barge through the underworld. And when he enters the underworld, the great serpent Apophis attacks the barge every night, attempts to sink it and kill the king of the gods. Every night, Apophis is defeated because Ra is invincible. He is the strong one. He's helped also by other attendant gods, other lesser gods, and by the souls of the dead who had been faithful to him, served him in life, and also by the positive vibes that were given to him by worshiping Egyptians. For the Egyptian, that drama plays out every day, every night. When the sun rises in the morning, you know, Ra won again. Ra is the best. He is the strongest. And there's never any doubt for the Egyptian that Ra will win because Ra is the king. Until one day the Lord says to Moses, stretch out your hand toward heaven where Ra rules and his power will be shattered. God doesn't even wait for sunset, he doesn't even wait until the sun has gone down over the western horizon, he just snatches the light from Egypt in the middle of the day. One minute you're going along doing everything just fine, the next it would have been like switching off the lights. Boom, instant darkness. You can't see anything. And that lasts for three days. Can you imagine the anxiousness with which the Egyptians awaited the dawn that first night? Man, it's been a good 18 hours since the darkness started. It should be sunrise. Sven, am I right? I think my watch has stopped, man. It's gotta be like 10 o'clock now and the sun's still not coming up. What's going on? Sven's like, I'm sorry, Igor, but I don't know. Those aren't Egyptian names. Darkness is the ultimate attack on Egypt because the darkness declares that Ra, the king of the gods, is dead, crushed by the power of the God of the Hebrews. That's why darkness is bad. It's frightening. It's like being blind. When you wake up and you expect to be able to see something, you know, you wake up in the night and the night lights are all out because there's been a power outage and now you can't see anything because you have blackout curtains in your bedroom and you get up out of your bed and you're trying to kind of, it's hard to find your balance at first because you can't see anything, you can't see the horizon and so there's nothing to reference. It's disorienting, paralyzing, panic-inducing, dangerous. If you can't see what's in front of you, you're liable to get hurt or worse. The loss of visual stimulus leads to distress, psychological distress and physical distress, anxiety, depression, especially if you don't know how long the darkness will last. Darkness is also literally death. If there's no light, there's no photosynthesis. If there's no photosynthesis, there's no food. If there's no food for the animals, there's no food for the people. Ultimately, death, where there is no light, there is no life. Darkness is also a symbol in the Bible of judgment. The stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light. The sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light. Isaiah chapter 13, verse 10, describing the day of the Lord. Zephaniah chapter one, a day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. You see, darkness is a preview of hell. The sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Darkness is a preview of hell. Egypt has walked in darkness for centuries. They have loved the darkness. They have hated the light. And so God says, if you hate the light that comes from me, then I'm taking all of your light away. You've walked in spiritual darkness. Now you'll walk in literal darkness. a revelation of their spiritual state. They are powerless to ward off the hand of Almighty God when he comes to judge the earth. They did not see one another for three days. Some of us maybe feel like not seeing another person for three days would be kind of nice. When it's voluntary, when it's because you're out on a fishing trip, And you're enjoying creation and you can hear the babbling of the brook and you can hear the rustling of wings and the trees and you can hear the splash of the fish and it's just you and nature and creation and nature's God and you're just enjoying his goodness. That's awesome. Involuntary solitary confinement is no fun. for three days, they could not see each other. So Pharaoh, Pharaoh calls Moses. He says, go serve the Lord. Your little ones also can go with you. Just let your flocks and herds remain behind. There's desperation in this. Fine, all right, fine. I'll give you all the stuff you've asked for. The only thing that must stay behind is the animals because I want to make sure you come back. But Moses is not negotiating. Again, God does not negotiate. Moses, notice what he says. He doesn't say, please let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. He says, no, you must let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. Our livestock must go with us. Not a hoof shall be left behind. We must take them to serve the Lord our God, and we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there. We are all leaving. This is no longer a negotiation. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not let them go. Even the darkness did not break him. God dwells in darkness. This is what the Bible says, he made darkness around him, his canopy, thick clouds. 2 Samuel 22, 1 Kings 8, verse 12, Solomon said, the Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness. Psalm 97, clouds and thick darkness are all around him. He dwells in darkness. The idea there is you can't see him. He conceals himself. In concealing himself, he reveals something about him, which is that he is incomprehensible. He is bigger than you could grasp. He's not somebody that you can kind of boil down to his essential characteristics and then record on a piece of paper the way you can a drawing of a man or a woman. He is incomprehensible. He does reveal himself to us, but even in revealing himself to us, he doesn't reveal his fullness, because if he were to reveal his fullness, we would be consumed, destroyed. So God tells Moses on Mount Sinai, Moses says, I wanna see your glory. God says, no, because that would kill you. You can see my back, but you can't see my face, because if you saw my face, you would die. God dwells in darkness. When Yahweh comes down on Mount Sinai, you remember Exodus chapter 20 verse 21, the mountain is enveloped in darkness. The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. And so the ninth plague is as if Yahweh has come down on Egypt. And when he comes down on Egypt, his presence darkens the nation. They are now under his wrath. And so there is darkness for them. But for Israel, remember the blessing that the priests were supposed to say, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you. and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. That is what Israel gets in the ninth plague. Egypt gets darkness. God has turned away from them. They don't get to see him. Israel sees the light. He has come down in wrath on Egypt. He has come down in mercy on Israel. And this isn't the last time this happens. Exodus chapter 14. on the shores of the Red Sea. As Israel panics because of the approaching army of Pharaoh, the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them. The pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the nights. without one coming near the other all night. Egypt gets darkness from this cloud of God's presence. Israel gets light. Darkness is God's servant. He creates it, Isaiah chapter 45 verse seven. He commands it. but he is not darkness. I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of light. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. The only reason we see darkness when God comes down is because of us, not because of him. He himself is light. But he veils that light because the revelation of his glory in light would undo us. Darkness is God's servant. But even this servant of God does not soften Pharaoh's heart. Pharaoh's heart is hardened, the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, he would not let them go. Pharaoh said to Moses, get away from me. Take care never to see my face again for on the day you see my face, you shall die. Now in the ancient world, prophets had a status kind of somewhat similar to diplomatic immunity. a foreign prophet could come into a foreign nation and prophesy from that foreign nation's God. And there was this kind of understood arrangement to that. We won't kill your prophets if you don't kill our prophets. Moses here, speaking as God's emissary, as God's ambassador, has been confronting Pharaoh on behalf of the Lord of creation, calling him to repentance, and Pharaoh has consistently hardened his heart. Now, Pharaoh says to Moses, I don't wanna hear anymore. If you ever come talk to me again, I'll kill you. And in doing that, he cuts himself off from the revelation of God. It cuts himself off from mercy, from grace. It's tragic. There is no greater kindness that a human being can do to us than to tell us the truth. no greater kindness that God can do for us than to bring a person into our lives who speaks to us the truth about who he is and who we are. And Pharaoh here rejects it. So Moses says, as you say, I will not see your face again Now chapter 11 has Moses talking to Pharaoh again. Probably what happened here is chapter 11 verses one through three is a parenthesis explaining something that already happened. And verse four of chapter 11 picks up this conversation from verse 29. And we are gonna move through this. The Lord had said to Moses, I'm gonna bring another plague. And what I want you to do is I want you to tell Israel, every Israelite, that they go to Egyptians in general and ask them for silver and gold jewelry. So they do. We find out later, at the end of chapter 12, chapter 13, that when they did that, they got a lot of stuff. They plundered Egypt. received a great deal of gold and silver and nice clothes and all kinds of stuff. It's the kind of situation where you go into somebody's house and you just say, hey, could I have that? And you're not even asking if it's for sale. You're just, you know, it's just the whole house is free. Could I have that? And the person says, yeah. Could I have the silverware? Definitely. Take the nice stuff too. What's in your bank account? Oh, $10,000, you can have all of it. And the reason, the Lord says, is because they really want Israel to go. They really want Israel to leave. It's like they're trying to appease Israel's God by giving gifts to his people. The Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. supernatural willingness in their hearts to part with their possessions. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the side of Pharaoh's servants, in the side of the people. Notice, not in the side of Pharaoh, but in the side of everybody else. Everybody else sees Moses walking around and they're like, whoa, it's that guy with the staff. He means business. Don't get in his way. Hey Moses, looking good today. We love you, man. very great in the land of Egypt." That's just a parenthesis. Verse 4 of chapter 11, Moses said to Pharaoh, thus says the Lord, about midnight, I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt will die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl behind the hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle. There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again, but not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that Yahweh makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. and all of these, your servants, they're in Pharaoh's courtroom, in his reception room. So there's attendants all around, and there's nobles and princes, and Moses motions to everybody, all of these, your servants, they're gonna come down to me, and they're gonna bow down to me, and they're gonna say, please get out. And after that, I'll leave. And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger. Darkness and death often go together in the Bible. And so we read about the valley of the shadow of death. And so it's fitting that darkness precedes the coming of death. Three days of darkness. One of the things about when it's dark is that generally people are quieter. There's an oppressiveness to darkness that silences people. For three days, Egypt has sat in silence heavy with foreboding and a sense of impending doom. And that three days of silence is gonna be followed by a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt such as has never been before nor ever will be again. Why this cry? Because God is about to go out into Egypt and Egypt is not ready. God is about to come down in judgment. and every firstborn in the land will die of men and animals and only the firstborn. And that tells us that this is really a miracle. This is a supernatural event, not explicable by normal circumstances. But it's not just the firstborn of Egypt that will die. Moses is going to tell Israel, if you don't do what God tells you to do, your firstborn are gonna die too. God is coming down in judgment. And as we'll see, Lord willing, next week he's gonna make a way for people to escape the judgment, but it's going to require a substitute, a sacrifice. The firstborn here, by the way, that would mean the father's heir, whoever that heir is, whether it's male or female. Generally it would be a male, but since every household in Egypt was affected, as chapter 12, verse 30 tells us, it's possible that any female heir also would have died. Moses left Pharaoh in hot anger. Why? Stubbornness is frustrating. Stubbornness is frustrating. Trying to help someone who does not want to be helped is frustrating. The Lord said to Moses, Pharaoh will not listen to you. that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt. The reason Pharaoh is not gonna listen to you is because I have more to do. There's another sign coming. Moses and Aaron did all of these wonders before Pharaoh and the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart and Pharaoh did not let the people of Israel go out of his land. And again, we see there are the two motivations. God is doing something and Pharaoh is doing something. So what does this mean for us? How do we apply this? First, I think, is this, that we do not need to fear the powers of darkness. Ra was the king of the gods. The gods of the nations are strong. In fact, one of the Trends that's going on in Western society right now has been described as the return of the strong gods. People turning back to Odin and Thor, back to Jupiter and in some cases even Ra. The gods of the nations are strong. They're real beings. Jesus interacts with them. Paul says in first Corinthians chapter 10, the gods, the nations worship, the idols that they worship are demons. But you know, the thing about demons is that they know stuff. James chapter two, verse 19, you believe that God is one good for you. You know who else believes that? Demons. And you know what demons do with that reality? They shudder. They tremble in fear. When Jesus interacts with demon-possessed people in the Gospels, the most consistent declaration from the demon-possessed person is something along the lines of this. I know who you are. Have you come to destroy me? They're terrified of him. Darkness fears light. Light does not fear darkness. Light has no reason to fear darkness because you know what happens when you turn on a light? Darkness loses. It flees. The powers of darkness are more afraid of Jesus than you are of them. And Jesus is in you. Moses did not bind the power of the Egyptian gods. Moses didn't have that strength. Moses was just a tool in the hands of God. God binds the powers of Egypt and humiliates them. Yes, 1 John chapter 4 says, beware of the spirits, test the spirits, because there are dangerous lying spirits that have gone out into the world, and yeah, they're real and There's danger there. This is how you know the spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that doesn't confess Jesus is not from God. Then that would be the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and is now in the world already. Yes, there's danger there. Don't believe every spirit. There are lying spirits. But John says, little children, you are from God and you have overcome them. For he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. You have no reason to be afraid of the powers of darkness. Yes, take them seriously, Ephesians chapter six, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, we wrestle against principalities and powers in the heavenly places. Yes, they are powerful, but they are not more powerful than Jesus. Revelation chapter 12, John says, I don't know who these are, who are they? And the angel says, these are those who have overcome conquered the dragon by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. Romans chapter 16 verse 20, the God of peace himself will soon crush Satan under your feet. The gods of Egypt are absolutely powerless before the creator of all and he is on your side if you are in Christ. So don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. But also you don't need to fear the presence of darkness because this is God's world. Darkness also is his servant. Everything is part of his good plan and will become beautiful in its time. Egypt suffers for a very clear reason. They are afflicted with darkness for a very clear reason. They're under judgment. They have sinned against God, they have violated his people and so they suffer. The darkness that comes down upon them is a picture of the darkness that has rested on them for centuries. But in our lives, sometimes we encounter darkness too, not necessarily literal darkness, a darkness that literally deprives us of light while everybody else is fine, but we do encounter things like depression, discouragement, despair, suffering, affliction, confusion, things that don't make sense to us, we don't know what the next step is, we don't know how to go forward, Isaiah chapter 50 verse 10, who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant? Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God. Are there times when God seems to remove himself from us, when he seems to veil himself so that we do not see him and cannot find him no matter how hard we try? Yes. He does not actually do so, but there are times when it appears that he does so, it feels to us as if he has. But he never actually does. He never abandons his children. He never abandons you in darkness. He makes a distinction. As he made a distinction between Egypt and Israel so that Egypt suffered under darkness and Israel had light where they lived. My friend, if you are in Christ, you don't suffer like other people. You don't encounter hardships the way other people encounter hardships. Hardships for sinners are a sign of God's enmity and opposition. Hardships for you are a sign of God's love. So don't be afraid. He doesn't send things into your life the way he sends things into the life of an unbeliever. When he summons darkness and shadows spread their gloom across the sky, you must remember this. This was William Cooper. He was a man who struggled with extreme depression. He wrote this hymn. In the morning, one day, and by the afternoon, he had become convinced that he was not a Christian, that he had never been saved. And by midnight that night, he became convinced that his life should be ended. He didn't end it, but he never went to church again after that. One of his best friends was John Newton, and Newton spent hours Ministering to him and trying to help him, I believe Cooper was truly saved, but my goodness, he was broken. But this is what he wrote. In one moment of clarity, God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. He plants his footstep in the sea. and rides upon the storm. Deep in the dark and hidden mines with never failing skill, he fashions all his bright designs and works his sovereign will. Oh, fearful saints, new courage take. That cloud that you now dread is big with mercy and will break in blessings on your head. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face. God's purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower. Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain. God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain. So my friends, fear no darkness, because the light of the world lives in you. Let's pray. Our God, we marvel at your strength. We tremble at your power. We know that we ourselves deserve the same judgments and worse judgments than fell upon Egypt. And yet while we deserved to be cast into outer darkness, you have instead shown on us. You've brought light into the world. And the light is the light of men. And for a time we loved darkness rather than light because our deeds were evil. We fled from the light and hated the light, but by your grace, you brought us to the light. You drove away the shadows and clouds that beset us and you revealed yourself to us in mercy and in grace. So our Father, help us. Help us to walk in the light. Strive to be like you, holy, righteous, pure. Help us to hold out the light to others. Because Father, the day has not yet come when the souls of sinners are cast into the outer darkness. We pray your light would shine upon them too, on our neighbors, those we work with, those we meet on the streets, that you would draw them to life. And Father, we pray you would give us courage in all things, Because he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world, and we need not fear. So strengthen us, we pray, for Jesus' sake. Amen.