Episode Transcript
The title of the message this morning is A Beautiful Thing.
A Beautiful Thing.
We learned last week that chapter 4 is a personal letter.
That King Nebuchadnezzar wrote unto all people, nations, and languages that dwelt in all the earth at that time.
We also learned that the letter he wrote signified a change in Nebuchadnezzar's heart.
Now, if this is the first time you're with us, we study verse by verse.
So, there's a lot of background to this that we don't have time to get into, but other than to tell you that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Babylonian Empire before the time of Christ.
Several years, several hundred years before the coming of Christ.
He was one of the world empires.
We don't have a world empire at this time.
The last real world empire we had was Rome.
And when it fell, we really haven't had a world empire since.
We will again.
But right now, this was a main political head for the whole world, Nebuchadnezzar was.
And so if you could picture Instead of having like Donald Trump as the President of the United States, picture him or anybody else you choose being the king Of all the earth, the whole world.
Complete global domination.
Okay?
That's what this was at this time.
And so we see that this letter that he wrote to all the world signifies a change in Nebuchadnezzar's heart.
The pride and quick-tempered demeanor that he had previously, it had been a hallmark of his dealings with his subjects.
It's now overshadowed that pride and that quick temper is now overshadowed by humility.
And kindness in the letter as he begins telling them, if you'll look with me now in verse 1, so where we left off last week, Nebuchadnezzar the king.
Unto all people, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied unto you.
I sure enjoyed preaching on verse one last week.
But remember, this is not a fairy tale.
This is not somebody's imagination.
This is actual world history.
Get on the Internet, get you an old Encyclopædia Britannica if you still have one of those.
You'll find Babylon You'll find Nebuchadnezzar.
You'll find the dates that he reigned and the subsequent people who reigned after him. and the subsequent kingdoms that became world empires after his fell.
And this is the king Of all the world writing a letter to every person on the face of the earth.
That is a big deal, a very big deal, something we do not know about.
I mean, we've never experienced anything like that before.
And so he would have to write it.
Send it out on post to the different places, and then have proclamations made and read in the various dominions under him.
And so he says, Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied unto you.
And now that we have refreshed our memories with the letters greeting, let's begin studying the letters introduction.
Nebuchadnezzar said, Look in verse 2.
I thought it good.
I thought it good.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
Thank you, Father, for each and every person who's here this morning.
God, we know that each person sitting in this pew, dear Lord God, is a precious soul that you love, that you created.
You have a purpose for in their lives.
And I pray, dear Lord God, that they'll realize that purpose and they'll live it out, dear God. and die with no regrets.
I pray for each and every person here today.
Teach us, Lord, your word.
Enlighten our eyes.
And I pray you'll receive all honor and glory, that everyone's attention will be on you.
In Jesus' wonderful name.
Amen.
Nebuchadnezzar said, I thought it good.
Now, this is a Chaldean word here that's translated into our English word good.
And this word literally means beautiful.
Beautiful.
I thought it beautiful.
Up to this point in Nebuchadnezzar's life.
He was governed by fear, by anger, by false hope, by insecurity.
And by the way, when a lot of people are.
Are quick-tempered and try to exert power and everything, it's only masking that fear, that false hope, that insecurity, and that pride that they have.
But Nebuchadnezzar now tells the world that he's writing them this worldwide letter because of something beautiful.
In his eyes.
Nebuchadnezzar's life and letter remind me of a song that Bill and Gloria Gaither wrote.
Which goes like this.
If there ever were dreams that were lofty and noble, they were my dreams at the start.
And the hopes for life's best were the hopes that I harbored down deep in my heart.
But my dreams turned to ashes My castles all crumbled, my fortune turned to loss So I wrapped it all in the rags of my life And laid it at the cross.
Something beautiful, something good.
All my confusion he understood.
All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife, but he made something beautiful.
Of my life.
God wants to make something beautiful out of your life, no matter how messy it is, how broken it is, how confusing it is, how hurtful it has been.
He wants to make something beautiful out of your life, just like he did Nebuchadnezzar's.
Nebuchadnezzar knew his castle was crumbling.
He knew that he was the king of all the world, but he knew that his kingdom was coming to an end.
God had showed him.
He showed him the dream God gave him.
He showed him some other things that we're going to learn in this chapter.
And Nebuchadnezzar knew ultimately he was going to die.
You can only be on top so long in an earthly kingdom.
So he knew his castle was crumbling, but God had made something beautiful of his life, and he wanted to share it with the world.
People say, well, what about all these people that never heard of God?
And God has made himself known to the whole world.
But parts of the world have just rejected him.
He shared it with the world not too long before Jesus came.
Nebuchadnezzar was saying, I thought it would be a beautiful thing for me, look back in your text, to show the signs and wonders.
The signs and wonders.
Nebuchadnezzar found the signs and wonders beautiful in his sight, and he wanted the whole world to discover their beauty.
The Chaldean word translated signs here, it means something that signals the approach of calamity.
Signals the approach of calamity like an omen.
When I grew up, there was an old wives' tale.
And I thank God that a lot of those old wives' tales have gone away and didn't get passed down to another generation.
But there used to be this old wives' tale.
Look upon the face of death, never feel your baby's breath.
Y'all ever heard that wise tale?
Anyone?
Oh, we got a few.
We got a few.
There was a there was another one but but let's stick with that one.
And so the idea was if while you were pregnant you saw something dead or somebody dead.
Then that means your baby was going to die.
It was an omen.
It was a sign of calamity to come.
At first, It may seem like Nebuchadnezzar is contradicting himself because he's saying how beautiful this sign was that God gave him.
He wanted to show the whole world this omen of catastrophe that he said was a beautiful thing.
How can a sign of some catastrophic event be considered a beautiful thing?
In 1945, the United States was in a war, World War II.
And in that war, we dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Immediately killing about 80,000 people.
And they say that after those 80,000 people died, tens of thousands died later from the radiation exposure.
So that was a catastrophic event, 80,000 people blowing up at one time.
Very catastrophic.
To Japan, the bomb was a very ugly thing.
But you know what the bomb did?
It caused their surrender.
It caused their surrender to the United States.
It ended the war.
And to the United States and her allies, the end of that war was a very beautiful thing.
They could celebrate.
Ticker tape parade.
The beauty of devastation depends on what's being devastated.
Do you get the idea?
If you were held hostage in a dark tunnel by Hamas, Starved and tortured for two or three years, and the Israeli military or some other force marched in. destroyed your captors and then set you free, the devastation of your enemy would be beautiful in your sight, would it not?
It would.
That is the kind of ominous sign that Nebuchadnezzar is talking about.
Nebuchadnezzar is saying, I have good news.
I want.
To show you something beautiful that God showed me concerning a catastrophic event that's going to take place in the future.
That's literally what he's saying.
You know, that's what the Revelation is all about.
The book of the Revelation at the very end of the Bible is a sign.
It's an ominous sign about some great catastrophe that's going to happen at the end of the world.
But the catastrophe, the ugly part of that catastrophe is going to be to the enemies of God.
But to those who belong to God and His kingdom, it's going to set us free.
And that's a beautiful thing.
The signs are signals of coming devastation in the word wonders here, because he said signs and wonders.
Wonders mean something that causes people to be astounded, dumbfounded, amazed, to the point that they are stunned and speechless.
We can deduct, therefore, that God had signaled to Nebuchadnezzar that devastation was on its way.
And the truth that God showed Nebuchadnezzar about that coming devastation astounded him to that point.
Nevertheless, the truth Nebuchadnezzar learned from that was a beautiful and glorious truth indeed.
Nebuchadnezzar said, It will be a beautiful thing for me to show the whole world the marvelous signs of this coming devastation.
And those signs came from, look back in your text, he said, that the high God hath wrought toward me.
The High God hath wrought or performed or worked these signs and wonders to Nebuchadnezzar to communicate to him what's going to happen in the future.
Now the term the High God Is used consistently in the Bible to describe the one true sovereign God By distinguishing him from all other so-called powers or false gods in the world.
And the first time we see this designation is in Genesis 14:18.
When we are told, Melchisedech, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the Most High God.
I'm glad that my God is the Most High God.
You can carve you out some kind of figurine and bow down to it.
You can imagine that the stars or the sun or some lizard or whatever is your God.
You can bow down to that God.
You can invent your own little God in your mind and bow down to it.
But I thank God that if I trust In the Most High God, that no matter what you imagine your God, your powers can be, you know, back in the, well, not just in the Bible, but today, you know, Kim Jong-un over in North Korea, he considers himself a God.
Pharaoh in Egypt considered himself a God.
And whoever your God may be to you.
That God is not going to last very long, and He cannot overrule the Most High God, who is the one and only God.
And so he said, the most high God.
In Psalms 57, 2, King David said, I will cry unto God Most High.
Unto God that performeth all things for me.
We have a God that we can pray to, we have a God that we can.
Listen to and hear His word, and know that He is the Most High God, and nobody can come and overrule Him.
I get so frustrated when I see the president trying to do something that I agree with.
Now, I don't agree with everything he does.
But when he tries to do something that I agree with, that's really good and it's really righteous, and he tries to do it, I get so frustrated when they sue him.
And it goes to court, and then some court says, nah, can't do that.
Then it has to appeal to another court.
Nah, I can't do that.
And finally, he has to go up to the Supreme Court, then they kind of make the decision.
I get frustrated with all that.
And when it comes to our God, when it comes to God's Word.
When God tells you something in the Bible, nobody can overturn God's judgment.
Nobody can overturn what He said He's going to do.
So he's the most high God, and Nebuchadnezzar knew that the calamity that God showed him that's going to come And create something beautiful from that calamity, he knew that there wasn't any force in the world that could overturn what God said He's going to do.
The promise that God made to bring that calamity and end the war and establish peace forevermore on this earth.
Nobody can overturn God's promise, and that promise is called the gospel.
This will be a good time for us to remember, as I told you last week, that the Chaldeans or the Babylonians, they're descendants of Ishmael.
What we would commonly call today Arab people.
And the events we're reading about in the book of Daniel, they happened in modern-day Iraq.
This is all historical.
What we see in Iraq today is a mess.
We see the people that the actual descendants of the Babylonians are still alive.
They still call themselves Chaldeans.
And amazingly, there are people who identify as Chaldean Christians.
How did all that happen?
All goes back to this.
It all goes back to what we're reading today.
This revelation of the one true God.
That happened there in the Chaldean people, among the Chaldean people, and that spread across the world.
But this all happened in modern-day Iraq.
And so you have these Arabic people, and it's technically not Arabic unless they're speaking Arabic.
But we still know them as Arabs or Arabs is what we would call them here in East Texas.
But they're all descendants of Ishmael, so I'm trying to speak in a common way.
But w some of them speak Aramaic rather than Arabic.
But they're all still descendants of Ishmael.
And the vast majority of them are Muslim.
This is their ancestors that we're reading about.
And they're telling the world about the one true God.
The God of Abraham.
When he says the most high God, he's talking about the God of Abraham.
Nebuchadnezzar learned about the one true God.
From the descendants of Jacob, from the Israelites, from Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, from Daniel.
Those Israelites that he captured and brought them into captivity when Babylon conquered God's people.
And that's a whole nother part of history, and why he conquered them is a whole nother part of biblical history.
With referencing the high God, Nebuchadnezzar was speaking about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. whom Daniel and these three men descended from.
In Genesis 14, 19, Melchizedek spoke to Abraham, and he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abram.
Of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth.
These Ishmaelites had rejected the Most High God of Abraham.
Up to this time, they had been worshiping pagan deities.
They had been worshiping the stars and the planets.
But Nebuchadnezzar now acknowledged the God of Abraham for himself.
What a great revival this was in that particular time of history.
And he said that these signs and wonders that God had showed him, he said, were those the most, I'm sorry, the high God has wrought or performed toward me.
God had been dealing one-on-one with King Nebuchadnezzar, and Nebuchadnezzar was acknowledging who God was and the work God had done in his life.
Nebuchadnezzar said, Look now in verse 3.
How great are his signs His signs are so great whenever he says, How great?
He's saying, God signs the Most High, God signs the God of Daniel.
The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
His signs are so great.
They're great in the sense that they are exceedingly magnificent.
They are signs of the utmost significance.
I was watching a video a while back and they had these weightlifters and they were standing next to each other and boy they just had some big old muscles.
And then it showed this, it was the former strongest man in the world.
You ever seen him?
I'm trying to think of his name right now, but maybe it'll come to my head here in a minute.
Huh?
Not Ron not Ronnie.
I don't think Ronnie ever won the strongman competition.
But anyway, it was the strong it was the former strongest man in the world.
And this man, when he walked up to these guys They looked like little children up next to them.
Little children.
It was laughable when you saw them.
At first, it's But when he walked up there to shake their hand, they looked like little kids.
It was so funny.
When he walks up there, suddenly they didn't look so strong and fierce when compared to a giant next to them.
He says his signs are great.
That's what he's talking about when he's talking about signs.
Now In 2 Kings 19, verses 10 through 13, Brother Shepard was teaching in this passage not too long ago about Rabshekah.
Y'all remember Rab Sheikah?
Rabshekah was an official of the king of Assyria.
Who sent a messenger to Hezekiah the king of Judah, telling him, Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah king of Judah, saying, Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceiveth thee.
So the king of Assyria was saying essentially to the king of Of Judah.
Don't let God, don't let your most high God deceive you.
Saying, Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.
Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the lands.
By destroying them utterly.
And shalt thou be delivered?
Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan and Haran and Rezif?
And the children of Eden, which were in the lesser?
Where's the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hana in Iva?
In other words, he was saying, Do you really think your God, the God of Israel, do you really think Jehovah God Can deliver you from my hand.
Just look at all the other nations I've conquered.
And they all had gods too.
And could their gods deliver them from me?
No, they couldn't deliver them from me.
So don't let the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob deceive you, Hezekiah, for the king of Assyria will conquer you, and there's nothing God can do about it.
Now that was a sign from the king of Assyria.
That was an omen of catastrophe to come upon Judah.
You see?
And the king of Assyria was certainly a force to be reckoned with.
But Hezekiah knew that God's signs were greater than all, you see?
Anybody can boast.
Anybody can make an ominous declaration.
I'm going to destroy you.
Y'all ever seen two men about to fight in a professional Fighting championship or something, and they stand up there, I want to get you, and the other one, I want to get them, and I'm going to do this.
And they get in there, and one of them gets beat up.
And the guy that was doing all the boasting, a lot of times, they get beat up.
Hezekiah knew that God's signs were greater than all.
So before he believed the omen of doom from the king of Assyria.
He wanted to see what God had to say about it.
So in 2 Kings 19:14, it says, And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers and read it, talking about the messengers from Assyria.
And Hezekiah went up into the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.
He took the letter that said, Assyria is going to destroy you, King Hezekiah.
He spread that letter before the Lord and said, Lord, this is what the letter says.
Now, what do you say?
And in 2 Kings 19:32, the LORD sent Isaiah the prophet to assure Hezekiah, saying, Therefore, thus saith the LORD concerning the king of Assyria.
He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.
The king of Assyria had signaled victory over the king of Judah, but the Most High God of Judah signaled victory over the king of Assyria instead.
And God's signs are greater than the signs of the Assyrian king, who was later slain, just like God said he would through Isaiah.
A kingdom can signal a future victory over God's kingdom.
And what they say can sound terrifying.
When you read in the book of the Revelation, you will notice one thing about the man of sin.
You will notice that he's got a big mouth.
You remember that in the book of Revelation?
He's always boasting great things against the people of God.
You don't take the mark of the beast.
You don't join up with our political entity, is what that is.
You don't join our empire.
Then we're going to cut you off, we're going to hunt you down, we're going to kill you, and they'll be destroying Christians during that time.
That's coming.
And they're going to boast against God.
That's what the Bible says.
He's going to have a big mouth, basically, boasting great things.
So a kingdom can sound very terrifying, but when God signals a catastrophe, when God signals a victory over his enemies, He does so with exceeding magnificence and superiority.
Nebuchadnezzar said, How great are your signs?
So, when God signals the defeat of his enemies, you know what he's doing?
He's signaling the defeat over our enemies.
And we can rest assured of our victorious outcome because he has the superior signs.
Nebuchadnezzar said, How great are his signs?
Look back in your text, and how mighty Are his wonders.
Mighty are his wonders.
Now, the root word of that is might.
God has the power to back up.
The defeat that he signals toward his enemies.
So when God signals their defeat, he often does so with mighty wonders.
You see how that works?
Meaning that God performed some type of miraculous and powerful work to assure us of our victory to come.
That's what he did for Nebuchadnezzar.
That's what he's done for us.
Remember, what we're reading about in the book of Daniel, the story happened in their day, but it was for us in our day.
It was lessons they learned that we're to learn from as well.
What God taught Nebuchadnezzar, he's teaching us.
When God signals their defeat, He does so with mighty wonders.
And that's exactly what God did with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
How great are His signs, how mighty are His wonders.
And the gospel message.
The gospel message signals the defeat of this fallen world in our victory over sin, Satan, and death.
This world's a mess, folks.
This world is an absolute chaotic mess.
And that's how come when you listen to the radio and you watch the news, that's how come you get all stressed and that tension balls up inside you.
That's how come so many people say, I don't even watch the news anymore.
Any of y'all ever feel that way?
I ain't watch it anymore.
Yeah, I see your hands going.
Why?
The world's a mess.
It's a mess worldwide.
And even if you make it and you struggle through this world, this messy, chaotic world, eventually you're going to succumb to it.
You're going to die.
And so we're in bondage to this world.
You can't get out of it.
Have you ever felt like this?
Have you ever felt like If there was only a country I could go to.
You ever felt that way?
How many of y'all ever felt that way before?
Look at that.
Hands going up everywhere.
And you know the feeling of exasperation you get when you realize there is no other country you can go to.
I saw the other day where some lady went to this country and over in Africa she was going to escape America.
She got over there and she said, I'm sick of looking at skinny cows and goats and everything, and I want to come back home.
There's no other place you can go.
It's this way everywhere, because the sin of Adam is global.
And at the heart of this fallen world, It's all ruled apart from the divine inspiration of God.
God created this world to be ruled by Him.
And when the world rejects God as its ruler, then all you're going to have is chaos.
So there's no place we can escape to.
There's not another country we can go to.
You can't go to another planet.
Some people dream of going to Mars.
I'm not interested in that.
I like what my mama said.
Jesus didn't come back to Mars.
I don't want to go there.
But some people say, well, we'll go to Mars.
Yeah, right.
I guarantee if you ever got on Mars and you set up a colony there, you'd be looking back at that blue planet thinking, what was I thinking?
So we're in bondage to this fallen world system.
We're in bondage to our own sin.
We're in bondage to death because this world system will take us down.
Sin brings death.
That's why we all have to die.
And so the gospel message is this beautiful news.
That God signals, God has given us an omen, a promise, that He is going to destroy.
This corrupt world system that the devil has organized through the rebellion of man, he's going to completely defeat it.
And God is going to set his kingdom back up and rule the world again.
It'll be the Most High God, not a republic.
Some people say, well, I love being a republic.
A republic and a democracy will only work if the people are smart.
You got stupid people.
You got stupid representatives.
Democracy's not the solution.
We know that.
A theocracy is God coming back and ruling his people in righteousness and love and grace.
Restoring our health and our life and our joy and our happiness and our freedoms that we have the way He designed us to be.
In living forever with no fear of death and no tears ever entering our eyes.
That's the defeat of the enemy and the guaranteed victory of God's people in the gospel message.
And Nebuchadnezzar says God has these great signs and these mighty Wonders, meaning the miraculous and powerful works that he performs to assure us of our victory in Jesus to come in the gospel message.
God signals the defeat of this fallen world and our victory over sin, Satan, and death.
So when Jesus was born of a virgin, you know what that was?
That was a great sign of our victory to come.
You got that?
How great are his signs, how mighty are his wonders.
When Jesus was born of a virgin, that was a great sign from God.
Of our victory to come.
Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14.
Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14 says, Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you, set with me, a sign.
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
So When the virgin bore a child, that was God becoming flesh, being born as a man just like us.
So he could come and redeem this world back to himself.
That's a great sign.
What a sign, a virgin having a child.
That was prophesied back in the book of Isaiah.
And God assured us of the exceeding greatness Of his power to fulfill that gospel promise by not just giving us a great sign, but by performing a mighty wonder.
When Jesus was raised from the dead, that was a mighty wonder that God showed us to say, I've got the power to back up that ominous sign.
I say when Jesus was born, he was born as king of all creation.
And that's how come the world crucified Him.
That's how come the Jews said, We have no king but Caesar.
Crucify him.
That was this fallen world rejecting God as its king.
So he died on that cross.
He was buried in a tomb.
And then God took the great sign of his virgin birth and backed it up with a mighty wonder by raising him from the dead.
Something no other God can do.
Ephesians chapter 1, verse 19 through 20 says, The resurrection of Christ shows us.
What is the exceeding greatness, right?
How mighty are his wonders?
What is the exceeding greatness of His power to us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, right?
How great are his signs, how mighty are his wonders.
His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places.
Because God raised Jesus from the dead, He showed us through that mighty wonder that look back in your text in Daniel.
His kingdom, that is, Jesus' kingdom, as an everlasting kingdom.
Why?
Because our king, having overcome death, shall live forever.
Therefore, his kingdom shall be forever.
You see, the message God taught us by his great signs and mighty wonders is the same message God taught Nebuchadnezzar.
By the great signs and mighty wonders that God showed him.
By the signs and wonders God showed Nebuchadnezzar, he taught Nebuchadnezzar, and by revealing those signs to us in the book of Daniel, he also taught us.
That Jesus' kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.
Now remember, Nebuchadnezzar had seen Jesus in that fiery furnace.
He said, That fourth man is like this is the fashion of the Son of God.
And now he's saying, His kingdom.
Is an everlasting kingdom.
That's what God's signs and wonders had taught the world ruler at that time.
And then he goes on and says: look back in your text, in his dominion.
It's from generation to generation, unlike Nebuchadnezzar's.
Nebuchadnezzar figured it out.
Man, I'm going to die.
Okay, I'm the ruler.
Of the world over this generation, but I'm going to die.
Another generation is going to come after me.
Somebody else will rule it, and the government on earth will look different than it looks now.
And one nation will rise, the other will fall, different divisions of power.
Will happen, and that just changes from generation to generation.
But he says, Jesus' kingdom Is an everlasting kingdom.
His dominion is from generation to generation.
Jesus' kingdom and dominion will never end.
So if we belong to Jesus' kingdom, then we shall never end.
That's the beautiful thing God wanted to show Nebuchadnezzar.
That's the beautiful thing Nebuchadnezzar wanted to show the people of the world at that time.
And that's why Jesus came, was born, lived, died, and rose again to show us.
That's why Jesus said in John 3, 16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Those who belong to an everlasting kingdom enjoy everlasting life that their king gives.
Nebuchadnezzar said he considered the signs and wonders of God to be a beautiful thing.
And the saints of God say the same thing.
Yes, God.
They are beautiful indeed.
Thank you.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
I thank you for the people here.
Thank you, Father, for giving us these mighty signs and wonders throughout the ages of this world.
Thank you for documenting them for us, Lord, not just by Jewish people, but by people like Nebuchadnezzar, an Arab.
Someone who now is an enemy of a Jew.
But Father, we thank you for giving them to the world in Adam and Noah.
Given to the world again, Father God, in the times of these world empires, in the time, dear Lord God, of Christ.
And now preaching them to all the world, Father God, through your church.
Thank you, Father, for giving us your word, the Bible.
And thank you, Father, for your signs and wonders being exceeding great and mighty.
It's in those we trust because they signal the world's defeat.
In the victory of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in His name we pray, amen.
