My God and My Neighbor

Studies show that depression is a common problem worldwide. There are many reasons for it. In poor countries the cause may be poverty. In America, ironically, the reason may be wealth. In the Bible we read of many people who struggled with depression—some because of their own choices and others for no fault of their own. All of us must deal with it. 

The book of Ecclesiastes is about depression we can do something about by ...

He had it all – money, power, fame, and wisdom. He didn't have to worry about having enough money to pay for anything. He never had to ask anyone's permission to do something. He was the king of Israel in its heyday. But he also saw a lot of injustice in life. And with all his power, money and wisdom, there was often nothing he could do about the unfairness of life. He saw others being treated unfairly. And the most seemin...

Prophets of God were human too. They struggled with their feelings. They felt like giving up at times. They wrestled with the unfairness of life. Jeremiah, sometimes called “The Weeping Prophet,” shows this side of himself in the book that bears his name.  

This man of God asked God “Why?’ and “How long?” But God didn’t give him the answer we might expect. This is a hard lesson to learn, but this episode shows that God expe...

What if God did speak directly from heaven and answer our old question: “Why, Lord?” One Old Testament prophet kept crying out to God. He asked why evil was everywhere around him and how long God was going to tolerate it. When God answered him, He told the prophet that He was about to put an end to these evil people and their wicked ways. That should have satisfied the prophet and ended the conversation.

But it didn’t. The ...

If you are a Christian, it is scary to think about losing your faith. How does this happen? It happens when we are pulled away from God. It occurs when we are distracted. When we look at the world instead of listening to God, we are vulnerable. 

One of the great things about the Bible is its honesty about good and great men. It does not pull punches. Even the greatest men of the Bible were human. They were tempted and sinne...

How do you respond to a child or teenager who is complaining about something he doesn’t understand? You might try to explain, but he may not be ready for that. If he’s a teenager and is convinced he’s right, you’ll probably ask him some questions to show him he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. That’s what God did with Job. This final section to the greatest book ever written on the problem of evil ends with God r...

The argument had come to a standstill and God wasn’t speaking. That’s how the debate ended between Job and his three friends. They said their peace (and then some) and reverted back to the silence we see in chapter two. But unknown to the first-time reader of this book when Job chapter 31 ends was someone else. A younger man had been there listening to them argue. By the time they finished, he was about ready to explode wi...

It is very easy to get things out of perspective when we're stressed and hurting. We pull into ourselves in a self-protective mode. In a sense this is a natural response to suffering. It's part of the healing process. But we must not allow self-protection to become self-pity. And, when life has been very unfair to us, we naturally want to defend and justify ourselves. But we can go too far. We can be so determined to vindi...

We can only go so long without encouragement before we feel like we’re going to break. Christians are children of God, but we are human. We need encouragement from likeminded people. We need the support of others, especially when we’re down. “Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression, but a good word makes it glad” (Prov. 12:25). 

But sometimes we must face trials without encouragement for a while. This is what Job ...

Do you remember the great prophets in the Bible who reached the point where they wanted to die? Moses did. Elijah did. And now we are seeing that Job felt the same way. But there are some interesting differences between his situation and the circumstances of Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah were not suffering physical pain. Moses was feeling extremely stressed, and Elijah was both stressed and afraid. Job felt intense em...

There are times we feel like the devil has us in his grip and is doing everything he can to torment us. That was Job's situation, but the difference is that Job didn't think the devil was doing this to him. He thought God was torturing him, and it was almost driving him crazy because he couldn't figure out why.

Sometimes the troubles of life—one right after another or at the same time—cause so much pain that we wonder i...

There's nothing wrong with saving and protecting what you have. There's nothing wrong with planning ahead in case a catastrophe strikes. That's why we have insurance. 

Jesus tells Christians not to worry about the necessities of life in the Sermon on the Mount. But sometimes we wonder, "What if…?” What if the worst does happen? How would we deal with it? Would we keep our faith or lose it? Would we praise God or blame H...

The book of Job has been recognized as a great work of literature for centuries. But it is much more than that. It is an incomparably profound book on the most perplexing of human questions. It shows not only that bad things happen to good people, but that the worst of things can happen to the best of people. 

We will never fully relate to the sufferings of this man. But we do know something he did not, at least not in ...

People have debated this question for thousands of years. We read about it many times in the Bible. We seem to be agreed on the general principle but divided as to how it applies to specific situations. 

This is not just some abstract, philosophical discussion. It is very practical. It is very personal. And we will learn important lessons in the examples we will look at in this episode.

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• Scriptu...

When God told Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, Abraham faced a dilemma. On the one hand, he loved his son. On the other, God told him to do it. So he worked out away in his mind to fit these seemingly incongruent elements together. He concluded that after he offered his son, God would raise him back to life again. That's what we read about his thinking in Hebrews 11:17–19. But he left out a possibility—that G...

We do strange things when we’re desperate. Pain can cause us to deny the obvious if we convince ourselves it will give relief. This is why some turn to atheism. The thought of an all-powerful, all-loving God is a heavy weight to bear in a world of suffering and sin. For these atheists, the only way to live with this problem is to deny that such a God exists. But as we will see in this episode, that is no way to live. Athei...

Much of the trouble we have in living the Christian life comes from not looking at ourselves. We examine and cross examine others and even God Himself but fail to ask ourselves the same questions. This is true of the problem of evil. We want to know why when that same question is staring at us in the mirror. 

In this episode we find God turning the tables and asking man this question. Sometimes we are like children who ...

We need to tread carefully when we ask questions like this. After all, we are talking about God’s intentions, and we must not be guilty of putting words in God’s mouth. Thankfully, there is a passage in the Bible that talks about why God made the world and placed us in it. 

There is a reason why we are here. Many live their lives not knowing what this purpose is. Some even say there is no purpose, so forget about looking fo...

“Why, Lord?”Series

When you're dealing with a difficult problem, it helps to go back to the basics. That's true with the problem of evil which is the most perplexing question man can ever consider. In this lesson, we will look at two different kinds of evil in the world. One is moral evil which is sin. The other is sometimes called natural evil. This is suffering. If we are too understand this subject, we must k...