Good times at the info table.

Three things to keep in mind:

1) A perfect father will not be deterred by his childrens' quest for merely apparent goods. He gives us what we need and not always what we want.

2) A perfect father is sovereign and this is the story that he has written.

3) What God has ordained will strike us as unsurpassably good, better than whatever we could ask or imagine.

Mark Talbot speaking

This perfect heavenly father always hears the pleas of his children, and he always responds in what we shall finally know to be a gloriously merciful way, even if, and perhaps especially when it seems the Lord is not hearing or responding to our pleas.

God has ordained from eternity every moment of our lives so that in the end we each have a unique song of praise that we alone can lead.

The redeemed have an urge to make a chorus. When we lead them there will be no sense of ourselves but only a sense of Christ.

It's not implausible to think that many of the afflictions in Calvin's life were aimed at making him more reliant on God and his goodness than Calvin's own giftings and abilities.

Luther felt that his depressions were necessary. Nonetheless, at the same time, he saw them as painful and worthy of being fought against.

But over time he came to see them for the benefit that afforded, and so he was enabled to endure them with more patience and hope.

Talbot: Luther himself has said that without the tremendous battles with depression, etc. neither he nor anyone else could come to understand Scripture, faith, fear, or love of God.

He conjectured that King David must have been plagued by a very fearful devil, for he could not have had such profound insights if he had not experienced such great assaults.

Talbot: Often after we have suffered a while, the problem with how God can will something like that suffering resolves itself, because we start to see the good that God is accomplishing by it.

"Thieves and murderers are the instruments of divine providence and the Lord himself uses these to carry out the judgments that he has determined with himself.

Yet I deny that they can derive any excuse from their evil deeds on account of this." – John Calvin

Talbot: These two statements perfectly agree, though in diverse ways: Man is acted upon by God while at the same time he also acts.

Does it seem right to say that God willed Luther's spiritual depression? Ought we to believe that God planned from eternity past—that God willed—some of Luther's incredible and sometimes unacceptable crassness?

What about Calvin's ill health or the death of his infant child and wife?

Calvin assures us that God governs nature and "all [individual natures," including human nature and our individual human natures.

Consequently nothing in the natural or human worlds falls out of God's providential hands.

Talbot: Not only is the stage broken, but we are broken. Not only is the stage treacherous, but we are treacherous. All of us are untrustworthy, even if we are regenerate.

We are bad actors. Not only because we mess up. We mean to act badly.

Talbot speaking about the existence of sin and evil in the world (photo via Scott Anderson)

Mark Talbot: Picturing our world as having a broken stage is illuminating.

Seeing everything from Adam to the end is understood as happening on a broken stage.

We can't ever be sure that the floorboards or the speakers or the curtains will always work right.

You can now watch the video of Doug Wilson's message this morning.

Mark Talbot explains "the broken stage in the theater of God"