"Battle For Our Souls" RESCUE RADIO with Marjorie Cole

0:00 Music. Rescue Radio, because there's a war for your soul. Yes, Father God, indeed, indeed. The war has been done and won, and yet we're still in it. And this mystery, Lord God, that keeps hounding us, Lord, is it finished from the foundation of the world? Yes.

0:42 Are we in it today? Yes. Are we in two places at one time? Yes. So, Father, I thank you for helping us to navigate through this life, realizing that we are actually in the beginning part of our eternal life and hopefully that life for all of us will end with you forever in heaven and not be misguided and detoured to the pit of hell. So thank you, Lord, for intervening, Jesus, for rescuing us by dying in our place, by making it possible for whosoever will call upon the name of the Lord to be saved. And of course, because you gave us a free will, everything gets all moved around and you vote for us, The devil votes against us and we break the tie by whose report we believe.

1:23 And so I thank you, Jesus, that you believe the Father completely surrendered your life to him completely and took on the form of a human being and died in our place so that you could finish the works, the demands of death by dying. Giving your blood, all your blood in payment for our rescue, for our redemption, for our salvation. So Lord, I thank you for that. We thank you. We do not take that act of love for granted, and that is by the most, every person, idea or sense of the word, a true act of love when one lays down his life for his friend or his foe. And we were your foes at the time.

2:05 So, Lord, thank you for your faith in believing that your work would turn us back to righteousness. And thank you for giving us power over all the power of the enemy, even as we're sons and daughters. You've now given us, reinstated us with the power and the authority to forgive sins, to bind and loose, and to love our enemies. And So, Father, I thank you for the divine promise and protection, even as we're in this war, that's already been won, that you promised that no weapon formed against us will prosper, that no word said, deed done, or action taken will be able to be used by the enemy to bring forth any shame, trouble, or reproach. So get us out of that place of feeling afraid that it's all lost, all is lost. But let us now stand up and say that all things work together for good to those who love God, even though they think they're lost and things are lost.

2:52 You are more than able to turn things around in a second, in an instant, as you've shown us many times in your stories you've given us in the Bible. So, thank you, Lord. Give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to receive this revelation now in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we're continuing in our Relationship with God series, and our title is, Who is God to You? Is God a friend, a foe, or a father. And so today we're going to be talking about God as a foe, as an enemy. And this becomes a real, real stumbling block to a lot of people when they see how God does or doesn't behave according to their expectations, whether it's a prayer they pray or just over the course of the Old Testament, seeing all the things he did and not understanding why he did them, and then judging God for doing things that seem to be very out of character and out of context with a loving God.

3:48 You know, I've seen over the years people that have abused themselves, maybe abused their bodies, you know, with inducing hurt. Internalizing all kinds of chemicals and stuff like that. And they just lived a life of recklessness and not honoring God at all. And then when they end up in the hospital, they get really sick or something and they're dying. They're mad at God. They're mad at God. Why is, you know, they blame God. We often tend to blame God for what we've done ourselves. Yeah. And we've sown evil, and we're reaping evil, and we blame God for it.

4:31 Well, here's the problem. The problem is in the beginning, when God wanted people to love Him. He had to give them a free will to not love Him. And so that free will has become the problem, because we're not robots. We can choose yes or no. There's two kingdoms only, God's and Satan's. There's not a third kingdom of maybe I don't know or mental illness or accidents and fate and bad luck. That's not a kingdom. Those things are fruits that will come into the kingdom of hell. So Jesus is by the fruits you shall know them. So there's only two kingdoms. But the thing is, we ended up in this place of confusion. God votes for us all the time, but it doesn't look like that because the devil comes and puts a thought in there.

5:16 Well, if God is so good, then why? Why does he let all this bad stuff happen to me? Well, the reason God lets it is because he has to. He has power to do whatever he wants to bring things to, you know, straighten things out. And he will, and he does. But in the meantime, if you have used your free will to vote against him, to choose the devil's side, then the devil gets you because the rule is whom we yield their self-servants to obey. That's who slavery becomes. So when you're disobeying God, you're obeying the devil. When you're obeying the devil, then he says, Now, I have a right to work in their life, to be in their life. And so then you go to this place of despair and trouble and addiction and brokenness and all this stuff the devil has beat you up with.

5:59 And then you cry out to God, and before you cry out to God, usually the devil says, well, see, see, it's your fault. No, no, see, it's God's fault, because God had the power. God, if God's so good, then why did he let all this best of us? But the thing is, God has a perfect will for us, and that is to live in the joy and the goodness and the peace and the health and the abundance of the life he died to give us. And you can have that. Even on this earth, when things are so crappy and corrupted, you can still have that peace and that fellowship with God, that constant goodness and assurance of his love, you can have that even in the pit. That's because God is big enough to do that. We're living in the snake pit, but God is able, he took you out of that pit, whosoever will, and puts you on the rock, Christ Jesus.

6:42 And so you are strong and strengthened in him and he gives us armor and protection and purpose. But you don't have to live with God. You can go in and out, in and out, in and out of the pit. But when that happens, you're not living in God's perfect will, you're living in God's permissive will because he has to permit you to exercise your free will so you get in trouble. There are so many misconceptions about who God is and what he expects. You know, I remember... As a young man, as a teenager, thinking, you know, I really should serve God, but it would be impossible to serve God because I can't keep the Ten Commandments perfectly. I break three of them before I get out of bed in the morning. Which three, honey? I don't know. But I figured it was impossible.

7:25 And yes, it is impossible in our own strength. Yeah, but this isn't even the requirement. It isn't the requirement, but that was my attitude. Right. It's like, God is so hard to please. I'm finished before I start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the truth of a lot of people's thinking. But see, that's because Satan's concept of God, he has twisted and perverted the true nature of God, his love. He's twisted that into being, keeping perfectly the 10 commandments or walking in some legalistic ritual or religious demands that are impossible. So then we assume, well, that's what God wants. I can't do that. God is mad at me.

8:06 God is mad at me, and he's very strict, and he's very boring. Because it's no fun to serve God. That's not the God of the universe. That was the idea that I had. It's no fun to serve God. But then you find that, you know, Psalm 1611 says, in his presence there's fullness of joy. In his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. And that's the truth. Yeah, that's what the truth is. but it's a lot of people are lied to because sometimes they look at church, they look at a dead church and they think, oh man, I don't want that. Well, they look at the Old Testament, they look at the New Testament, they think of all the things that they're told about God. God is wrathful.

8:47 He's just basically so temperamental, he's always kicking out his wrath against people. So he can't be a friend. Ooh, he can't be a friend. So I want to avoid him. But who is God? You know, he even admits himself to us in Romans. He says he's justice and mercy, mercy and justice. Justice sometimes has to look pretty strict and straightforward and wrathful and separating the good from the bad. And mercy is, you know, foregoing whatever it is that we deserve to give us the place that we lost. And so, again, going back to the point, Satan wants you to judge God as being a foe, as being fickle, as being uncaring, as being, you know, distanced.

9:34 And so we are given the opportunity to fall in love with the devil. He's going to be your best friend at some point in the beginning. He's going to give you everything you want. You're going to have this love affair with his power, with his seduction, with his, you know, free gifts, his bribery, his blackmailing, and he seduces, he has basically, the whole world, I believe, has been set in that place of darkness. And then one by one, the little light, the flickering light of God's truth in the midst of this dark world, the flickering of God's consistent love and plan, flickers in the midst of it all and says he lights every man that comes into the world.

10:14 So every man that comes into the world has a moment, an understanding, a grasping of that, a glimpse of that light. And those who go for the light come to the truth. You know, is it, excuse me, righteousness and justice? Righteousness and truth. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne. Yeah, justice and truth are the foundation of His throne. So, the goodness of God. And the psalmist said, I would have lost heart unless I had seen the goodness of God in the land of the living. So the goodness of God, this is it. Yes, God is just. He is holy.

10:55 He, in a sense, is unapproachable because he's so holy. He is all God. He is all good. He is all righteous. He is all knowing. He is all loving. He is all merciful. He's all everywhere present. He's faithful. And He's faithful, totally faithful. And the thing is too is, the truth of the goodness of God has to come to the revelation of the Word of God. To counteract the lies of the enemy about how strict and harsh and awful He is. That He is an enemy. We think of God as just. An enemy rather than a friend. Yeah.

11:36 So we live in this pit of adversity and where everything is against us. Because why? Because Satan still hates us, even though he has us trapped in the pit. His one desire is to rid us, get rid of us, and get rid of our identity or who we are because we are still loved by God. Jesus, when he came, he said, I've come to seek and save that which is lost. And, you know, the devil has told us we're depraved and unsavable. And God did not come to seek and save the depraved. If you have something that's depraved, you throw it away. He wanted to, we were lost. We were precious to him, even though we were broken. And in the psalmist, you know, David and the various ones who keep praying and showing, you know, here we are, he was in a pit. If you know David's story, King David, he was grappling in this pit. He worshiped God.

12:21 He had found God in the way that God revealed himself to him, even when he's a shepherd boy. And he would worship and play his guitar, not a guitar, to God and worship and write all these songs. But then he grew up and killed Goliath because he had this power. He wasn't even very grown up when he killed Goliath. That was the beginning of his career. Teenager, probably. Yeah. And so then he ultimately was chased around in the wilderness by the bad king for 30 years or 10 years or whatever it was. And then he became the king of Israel, the greatest of all the kings, really. And here's one of the things that he said in his struggles. He's being chased by Saul or by whoever at that point. And he says in Psalm 40, verse 11, to God, he's praying to God, Do not withhold your tender mercies from me, O Lord.

13:07 Let your loving kindness and your truth continually preserve me. For innumerable evils have surrounded me. My iniquities have gone over my head so that I'm not able to look up. They're more than the hairs of my head. Therefore, my heart fails. Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me. So he is still, we're all in this place, this position of vulnerability, where we have the opportunity as God's children to come before him and remind him of the promise, the covenant that he has entered in through blood. And the Old Testament was the blood of the lambs. That was the covenant he made with Abraham. And they had to keep this covenant of bloodshed with the lambs and the sacrificing going on and on and on to every year, so that every day of every year, because they had to keep that covenant alive.

13:59 But that was the temporary, that was the shadow of things to come, because in the end, what happened was Satan was defeated when the blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, was slain on Mount Calvary. And that was the end of the blood, the need for the shedding of blood. But in the midst of that promise being fulfilled after, it was thousands of years, it was 4,000 years before Jesus got here. And we've been here now 2,000 years after that, so it's 6,000 years. So in that 4,000-year interim, people like David and Moses and various others, Abraham, God approached them. He started with Abraham, approached him again.

14:41 You know, Noah, of course, he landed the boat, and then things got, you know, kind of bad again, and got paganness. They built the Tower of Babel going back that, okay, so they landed the boat. Everybody's happy. Everybody's out of the boat, and they start to have kids, and the animals multiply, and blah, blah, blah. And so then one of the sons of Ham, which is the son of Noah, his son's son, decided that would be Nimrod, decided to build the Tower of Babel. And at the Tower of Babel, they were going to take matters back into their own hands under the influence of the fallen angels. And they were going to build this ziggurat to heaven so they could communicate with the fallen angels and get that intelligence, get that demonic, angelic intelligence so they could, you know, take over. Do more evil. Do more evil.

15:22 And so God didn't hurt anybody, but he just corrupted all their languages. That was kind of a fun fix to the problem. And they couldn't talk to each other. And so they couldn't build the tower anymore. So they scattered, and that became the nations. And out of all that, they were all pagan because the watchers. The divine counsel of God had betrayed him as well. And they were supposed to watch over these nations, 70, 72 nations. And they all went their own ways and began to fight with each other. And that's why we have the wars on the earth today. But anyway, back to the real story. That's just another dimension of the war, another dimension of the hatred, the contempt that Satan was using even more. The fallen, the watchers, the fallen angels to turn men against men, but we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. But in relationships, we forget that.

16:07 We think my enemy is my boss. My enemy is my wife. My enemy is what? So anyway, so in this, this Tower of Babel thing, at that point, God went and found him a friend. That's what he did. He was a foe to most, but he went and found a friend and his friend's name was Abraham. And Abraham was, you know, of the pagans. He was with the pagans, but he had this different idea. He thought, well, you know, why? He started to think. He started to actually think, well, how come these idols, my dad's idols, have to be carried around and moved around? They can't even move themselves around, and yet I'm asking them to move around and do things for me? Yeah. So he kind of got, you know, I guess logic helped him to say, this is ridiculous. So he asked his dad about it, and he destroyed the idols, and he got in trouble, and he followed God, God gave him the promise and God said, come follow me, get out of here. We'll go to Ur of the Chaldees.

16:58 We'll get out of Ur of the Chaldees and go where I'm going to show you a promised land. So God had this hope in his heart too, that he was going to reestablish a place of safety, a people for himself, going back to building a family. Another family in the midst of the world. And they're in absolute hatred of God. They're sacrificing their children. They're being controlled by demons. They're violent towards one another, and they're full of lust and perversion. Corrupting their own bodies, et cetera, gone and on. God pulls Abraham out as his friend. Abraham follows him. And Abraham then begins to, God says, I'm going to give you, like we said earlier, I'm going to give you so many descendants, you won't be able to count them. I'm going to give you all this land as far as the eye can see.

17:39 It's going to be yours and you will be my family. So they became known as the children of Israel. How do we get the word Israel, the name Israel because Abraham had a son, Isaac, which was the son. He had the promised son. There were several other sons. He had quite a few sons, actually, after. But the only one that really God was interested in that the promise was given to was Sarah because Sarah was the mother of Isaac. She was her only child. And so Isaac had two sons. One was Jacob and one was Esau. And Jacob's name was changed to Israel. So that's why we get the children of Israel who were the children of Isaac, who were the children of Abraham, and these were the children of God.

18:20 So this was his family on the earth. In the midst of the snake pit, in the midst of everybody else's following Satan and their gods, their idols, their sticks and stones, God was the one true God. In James 2, verse 23, breaking in there, it says, Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness, and he was called the friend of God. Yep. Wow. And so think about it. No foe. No foe anymore. So God had one ally on the earth, basically. He found a man, one guy, who was willing to be his friend. And so what happened there, Abraham, how this happened, he became a friend of God, is he believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

19:03 And you're talking earlier about keeping the Ten Commandments. Abraham had no Ten Commandments. There was no Ten Commandments in Abraham's whole lifetime. They came with Moses. So Abraham was considered righteous, not because he kept the thou shalt nots and thou shalts, but because he believed the promise of God. The promise of God, it says, why is it saying James? He believed, and that was accounted to him for righteousness. I think it's James, I'm sorry, Romans 4. Well, yeah, it's Romans 4, and it's referred there too. But it's interesting. It talks about, was not Abraham our father? And James 2.21, justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar.

19:46 Do you see that faith was working together with his works? And by works, faith was made perfect or complete. So basically, he believed God and he showed his, he expressed his faith through obedience. And not only did he offer Isaac, but before that, he had to believe for Isaac. So in Romans chapter 4, 25 years. So he said here in the, therefore, in verse 416, therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.

20:29 So it was written, he said, he is making him the father of many nations and he called him and contrary to all hope, he also promised him a son. Of course, he didn't have that son at the time. The promise was made. Who contrary to hope, in hope, believed that he would become the father of many nations according to what was spoken. So shall your descendants be. And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his body already dead. He was already 100 years old since he was about 100 years old. And then the deadness of Sarah's womb, because she was right behind him. She was probably 85, 90 years. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief. So Satan was beaten on his door to say, this is never going to happen.

21:10 You know, you're too old. You're all dried up. There's never going to, this is a big hoax. God has just lied to you. But Abraham held on like a bulldog to this promise and was strengthened in his faith, giving glory to God, even in the midst of what didn't look like it was ever going to happen. If you and I can give glory to God, you hold on to the promises of God, no matter what that relationship looks like, no matter how bad it is, how far away that prodigal is, you hold on to that promise of God because you know God's will is for you to be healed and restored. That's what God's will is. And so if you want God's will, then believe God and do what God says. And at this point in time, all Abraham could do was wait.

21:52 That's all he could do because, you know, and waiting is the worst part of every trial because the devil comes every day. Oh, it's never going to happen. It's never going to change. It's never going to work. Who do you think you are. You're so stupid to believe God. So Satan had 25 years to beat on Abraham, to try to get Abraham to give up on the promise of God. I'm sure that Satan has beat on some of you guys for 25 years, hoping for this and waiting for that, and it didn't happen, and it didn't happen the way you thought it would happen. And so you gave up and got mad at God. But here he says, and being fully convinced that what he, God, had promised, he, God, was also able to perform, and therefore it was accounted to him for righteousness.

22:33 So his righteousness came through faith. It came through faith and believing in the promise of God, not in keeping the law. That law was not able to save, and Galatians, Paul says, the law can't save you. Because the law can't be kept. Yeah, and that's why God made it impossible for the law to be kept, because he didn't want us to be saved by a law, by rules, by earning our salvation through works. He wanted it to be his gift. He wanted it to be the grace and the goodness and the love of Jesus Christ laying down his life for us. And there was 4,000 years almost. Well, this was probably a 2,000-year interim by the time Abram shows up, maybe a little bit more than that, maybe 2,500 years, before Jesus gets to the cross.

23:17 Okay, that's my math. You can check it out. But anyway, it was a long time. And so this has been the ordeal of the human race for the first 4,000 years, to believe for that promise made to Adam and Eve. Believe, believe, believe. Then God created the children of Israel to carry that promise. They were the only ones, all the pagans around them were worshiping the sticks and stones and sexually perverted and, you know, whatever. What are they all doing? Sleeping with animals, et cetera. And so all this crazy was going on, except in this holy little lump of people gathered together. Seventy-five people, Abraham's descendants, went down into Egypt, were there 400 and some years, 430 years. And in that process, they were incubated in that it started out good, ended up terribly in the crucible. But in that.

24:07 Cauldron, a million people came out of that 75 people in that 400 years. So now we have a million people that God is rescuing, again, moving in on the human story with his own divine acts of taking down Pharaoh, setting the captives, the people free from the oppression of Egypt, opening up the Red Sea for them to get through it, opening up the Jordan, taking down Jericho, giving them Moses and Joshua to take, now they're going back in to take the promised land that they left 430 years before. And now while they were gone, it was all filled up with giants. So now they had to go back in and take out the giants. And so here we have the drama and the war and see Satan, he did not want them to have the promised land.

24:51 So what did he do? He filled it up with literally giants. Og and Sion were the king of Og and Bishan. These were giants. These were not little guys that are, you know, five, six feet tall. These were giants. And so Joshua and his guys, they had to take them out. They had to believe God to regain what God had promised them in the first place. This is crazy. What we have to remember is that in every situation, God is working on something bigger than what we see around us. And nothing is as it appears to be. And in whatever you're going through today, just think of it this way. God has got something bigger in mind. It's something beyond what you see, what you feel.

25:37 He's doing something that is greater. And you don't see it at the time. In the moment. In the moment, you might not see, how can any good come out of this? This really sucks. This is terrible. But God has got a bigger picture. Yeah, he does. He's got the full picture. Because he's good. And all things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. Yeah, there's a little book called Lamentations. It's five chapters. It comes right after Jeremiah. Some of you may have read it. And in Jeremiah, that whole saga of 40, 50 chapters, Jeremiah is pleading with the children of Judah to come back to the Lord, come back to the Lord. They don't listen.

26:21 And so their kings blew him off. I mean, he wrote books and letters and visited them, and they threw him in the pit, and they threw him in prison, and they threw him in whatever. They locked him up. And all the while, he's the prophet of God begging them to turn around. It's not too late. turn around. Because there's two tribes, two different divisions of the children of Israel at this point. There's Israel, who was taken off captive by Assyria, and that's the 10 tribes. And then there were the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin that were left that stuck with the Lord a little longer. And so Jeremiah's talking to them, oh, don't go like the others going off to Assyria.

27:04 And so he begged them. And so, but they refused that the king actually, there was prophecies that this king would be, his eyes would be plucked out. He'd see his kids killed in front of him. Zedekiah. Zedekiah. Yeah. And all of that happened to him. And so at the end of that now, and everybody's taken off into captivity and there's just a few little people left in the land and it's all trashed and burned and devastated and overrun and just destroyed. Jeremiah is weeping, and he's crying out to the Lord, and he's lamenting, he's lamenting, and in chapter 1, verse 12, he says, he's still, well, I'll start with 11.

27:44 All of her people sigh. They seek bread. They have given their valuables for food to restore life. See, O Lord, and consider, for I am scorned. You know, he was rejected, of course. The adversary has spread his hand over all her pleasant things, for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary. Interesting. Seen the nations enter her sanctuary, to whom you have commanded not to enter your congregation. And then in verse 12, Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see if there's any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the Lord has inflicted on me in the day of his fierce anger.

28:25 So why was God freaking out and getting so mad? Because he had to deal with this situation. Again, these people had all gone into idolatry. They'd gone into sacrificing their sons and daughters. That's about the bottom line. That's about the end of the line. It doesn't get any worse than that. You can kill a full-grown man as an enemy, but when you're starting to sacrifice your babies, born and unborn, to the blood. Shedding their blood for your own benefit, that's where God has to step in. So anyway, so this is what they were doing, and they were not heeding Jeremiah. So Jeremiah is weeping and sad and sorrowful and full of grief.

29:06 But in the middle of the book of Lamentations, after he said, God has inflicted us, and God has protected them, but he sent some of them off safe to Babylon, his little seed that wasn't going to be destroyed. But some of them had to go away. And then he said in the middle of, he says, chapter 3, verse 22. Through the mercies, through the Lord's mercies, we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. This is Jeremiah with great faith. They are new every morning. This is where we get that new every morning thing. Great is your faithfulness. That's a song. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

29:48 It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for man to bear the yoke in his youth. So he's saying his mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness. The Lord has not cast us off forever, though he causes grief, verse 31. Yet he will show compassion according to the multitude of his mercies, for he does not afflict willingly or grieve the children of men to crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, to turn aside the justice to a man before the face of the Lord Most High, or subvert a man in his cause the Lord does not approve. So he's reaffirming the goodness and the character of God who is not willing, is not happy, is not participating. He has seen men use and yield and their free will to follow the devil, to disobey, to do all the things God said not to do.

30:34 And now we're in this terrible predicament, and God has got to bring severe correction, chastening. He's not destroying them. He's bringing this correction, chastening, because they're still not to Bethlehem. They're still not to the place of the promise. And so they're still not to the place where we are. And so God had to correct them, but God, like a parent. Sometimes he has to chasten his child to correct them for the sake of protecting them and preserving them and teaching them, training them to be good and be righteous citizens. Yeah. And so many times, excuse me, so many times, again, we don't see God, we don't see the goodness of God, the goodness of God, the greatness of God.

31:15 And we see it supremely in Jesus Christ. God the Father sending Jesus Christ to sacrifice for us. In Romans 5, verse 6, For when we were still without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man would one die, yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die. Well, they're worth it. We think they're worth it, right? Because they're good. So his relationship was always the one of love. It never changed. It was always God always loved, even underneath all the wrath, the correcting, the disciplining, the chastening, the letting them go their way kind of thing.

32:00 There was always one thread that stayed, and that was God's unchanging love for his people and for us, for Jesus to come. And this was brought to a climax, Romans 5.8, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And he talks about. Much more, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath to come, wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.

32:43 So basically, while we're enemies, God is taking the step. He's taking the first step to reconcile us, to bring us back together. We're not really, I mean, He reconciles us to Him. Well, yeah, He had the plan from the beginning, and this is how the plan is unfolding. So the whole Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, is the plan of God's redemption after that, chapter 3, after the fall in Genesis. The whole rest of the book is basically God's promise being fulfilled. God's plan coming forth with the devil, knocking him down, trying to kick him out of the race, killing people. It's just the battle between God and Satan to wrestle. God has wrestled his way through this mess of our free will and our rebellion.

33:26 And even to this very day, there's still that wrestling match to save the righteous, to save. We are saved, but to use us now. I believe now that the point is after the death of Jesus is to use the followers of Jesus Christ as the remnant to bring forth his true will and purpose, which is love and life and eternal life for those who are still lost. So we're now entered into the fight with Jesus to turn the foes, his foes, into friends. Into friends. Yeah. And the thing is, the marvelous, persistent love of God. Yeah. He is so persistent. You think of all through history, Margie, all through history that we read about in scriptures and history that we don't see in Scriptures.

34:11 You know, it's just been wrath, evil, fighting war, betrayal, tragedy, sickness, disease, demonizations, all this stuff. God is still saying, I'm not giving up on you. And he proves this by sending Jesus. In Romans 8, 31 and 32, what then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Amen.

34:54 So that's God's heart. God hasn't changed. He's had to do some behaviors to adjust things for us and deal with our enemy. But God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Father, we thank you for your consistent love. We thank you for your powerful love. We thank you that your love has defeated our enemy. Your love has crushed fear under our heads, under our necks. That was crushing us. You've crushed it under our feet, Father God, that it no longer has power to destroy us. So thank you, Lord, and let us rejoice and be thankful this day and every day. And start living your life as a winner, as a victorious one, as one that has taken a stand for God.

35:35 And do not back down. You will not regret it. In Jesus' name, give us your courage. Amen. Amen, amen. And we're going to mention again, doing relationships God's way. And there's a chapter in there, right? One of your chapters is dealing with our relationship with God. Exactly. Yeah. God is a father. That's what we'll be talking about in part three, God as our father. So the Lord bless you all. Take an opportunity to get a copy of the book, Doing Relationships God's Way. and don't neglect to read your Bible first. Everything is all comes from the word of God. Bless you and have a wonderful, a wonderful week. Music.