How Can God Allow Suffering?

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and Happy Father’s Day. It’s good to see you all here as we gather to worship together.

I have a few announcements I’d like to highlight from your bulletin.

There will be no evening activities tonight in honor of Father’s Day.

There will not be a deacon meeting this month but we will be meeting next month to help prepare for the community revival.

We’re having a workday next Saturday morning, June 24, to get our pavilion and playground ready for both Bible School and the community revival. That will be from 9-noon. If you’re able, please try to come and help out.

We’ll also be having a very brief business meeting on June 25 after our morning service to approve some much-needed things around the safety of our church, including pushbars on the doors. If you’re a member, please stay behind for that.

This month’s collection for Operation Christmas Child is flashlights and batteries, tools, rope, and fishing kits. You can leave those in the Sunday School classroom across from Randal’s.

And we are also collecting paper products for Love INC this month. You’ll see a list of needed things there in your bulletins, and you can leave those either up front or in Randal’s room.

Lastly, you may have gotten a phone tree message yesterday regarding Brenda and Danny Johnson. Brenda is still in the hospital and will be for a little while longer. Joanne and I visited her this week and she was in very good spirits, but it looks like her recovery will take a little longer than expected. Danny is also dealing with some fairly serious back issues. Please reach out to them and check on them, and especially be in prayer for healing for both of them.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray: Father we are so grateful to be able to gather in this place, in this town, to worship you. We’re thankful for another week filled with your blessings and protection, thankful for a day of rest to raise our voices to you. And today, Father, we’re especially thankful for the fathers in our lives and for the blessings they’ve given us through you. We’re especially thankful that we have a heavenly father in you, one whose love never fails, whose patience never wanes, and whose protection is constant and clear. To you we cry, “Abba, Father,” knowing that you will never reject us and never turn away. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Father’s Day

I’ll ask Jesyka to come forward to honor our fathers this morning.

A father has been defined as a son’s first hero, and a daughter’s first love. Today we honor the fathers in our lives, both the ones present and the ones waiting further on.

Proverbs 4:1–4 says, “Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight, for I give you good precepts; do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender, the only one in the sight of my mother, he taught me and said to me, “Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments, and live.”

Let’s have a word of prayer:

Father, We thank you for the gift of Dads in this life. We thank you that you are the greatest Dad ever, Abba Father, and we know that you cover us in your great love. We pray for your blessing, favor, and strength over every Dad in this world, for those who are seeking to walk closely with you in a dark world, and for those who just need to be reminded that you are real. We ask for your renewed courage, for your boldness, for your Spirit to fill them. Make them always aware and alert of the schemes of the enemy. Keep their footsteps firm, and guard their way. Help them to always stand strong, to be men of faith, to say “no” to what is wrong and to say “yes” to what is right. We ask that you would fill their hearts with love, compassion, joy, faithfulness, and cover their lives with great peace. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

We’re taking a look at some of the most-asked questions about God and Christianity on the internet. So far we’ve covered three of those: Why does God send people to hell? Do we have free will or does God determine everything? And last week, we answered the question of what happens when we die.

Today’s question is the big one. Today’s question is the most powerful objection to the existence of God, and it’s the biggest reason that people abandon their faith. It’s known as “the problem of evil and suffering,” whether it’s the natural sort, like cancer or earthquakes, the supernatural sort, like the existence of the devil, or whether it’s just all the horrible things people do to each other.

If you remember last week, I mentioned a man named Stephen Fry, who was once asked what he would say to God if the two of them came face to face. I’ll remind you again what he answered: “I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil. Why would I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That’s what I would say.”

Let’s set aside the meanness of those words and focus on the words themselves: “Bone cancer in children? How can God create a world to which there is such misery?” You know what? Those are really great questions. Those are probably questions you’ve asked God too. They’re certainly questions I’ve asked.

The most common question both believers and unbelievers ask God is, “Why?” Why are you doing this, God? Why did you let this happen? Why won’t you do something about that? Why do you let me feel this way? Why can’t things ever get better for me, or for my family, or for the world?

Whether we believe in God or not, whether we’re Christian or not, every person in the world understands that something has gone terribly wrong, things only seem to be getting worse, and that it’s been like this for a long, long time. So long, actually, that the first person to state the problem of evil was actually a philosopher in ancient Greece named Epicurus. Here’s how he argued it:

If God is all-powerful, then he can stop evil.

If God is all-loving, then he would want to stop evil.

But evil still exists, so an all-powerful, all-loving God can’t exist.

In other words, Epicurus is saying, If God’s so good, then why is his world so bad? If an all-good, all-wise, all-loving God is running the show, then why does it feel like he’s doing such a terrible job? Why do bad things keep happening to good people?

As Christians, we’re called to have an answer to those questions. First Peter 3:15 says we have to always be prepared to make a gentle and respectful defense to anyone who asks for the reason for the hope that’s in you. People are hurting. They’re hurting for answers to the problems and questions they have. As heaven’s ambassadors, we’re the ones who are supposed to provide those answers.

But it’s also more than that. Having an answer to evil and suffering is going to help us personally, in our own lives, because life hurts us as much as anyone else. A lot of times, as believers we’re affected by evil and suffering even more so.

So what can we say to people who are burdened by the problem of evil? And what comfort can we know God gives us when we’re the ones struggling with with evil as well?

Other than Christ himself, it’s hard to find another person in the Bible who suffered more than Paul. Read through Acts and Paul’s letters, you’ll find that he’s kidnapped, beaten nearly to death, arrested several times, accused in lawsuits, interrogated, ridiculed, ignored, shipwrecked, and bitten by a snake. Not to mention that Christian history says that Paul was eventually killed for his faith.

Given all of that, it’s no wonder that nobody talks more about how we’re to approach the problem of evil than Paul. And just as with so many other things in the Christian life, Paul says the key to living with the problem of evil is where you look. It’s where you keep your eyes.

Turn with me to one of his most famous passages about suffering, 2 Corinthians 4. Today we’re going to be looking at verses 16-18:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

And this is God’s word.

Again, it’s so important that we have at least the start of an answer to the problem of evil and suffering for two reasons. It’s often the biggest thing that keeps people who are sincerely searching for God from finding him. And at some point, evil and suffering are going to impact your life. They just are. No one’s spared from troubles, and it doesn’t matter how much faith you have. Pain is woven into life itself, and so when that pain comes to your life, you are absolutely going to need a godly means of thinking and feeling about it.

Those two words, thinking and feeling, are very important. Those are the two different ways we need to look at this problem — there’s the head version and the heart version — which means there are two different ways we need to answer it.

The heart version of this problem is the one that’s really more important, and that’s what Paul’s dealing with here in 2 Corinthians 4. He’s talking about using the heart to answer the question of why there’s evil and suffering in the heart. It’s emotional, and the emotional problem of evil is all about having trouble believing in a God who would allow suffering. “No God who would let me hurt this way, or let the world be this bad, is the kind of God I could ever love, let alone worship” — that’s what the emotional problem of evil says.

But there’s also a need to answer this problem with the head too. It’s not just emotional, it’s intellectual as well, and the intellectual problem of evil is all about deciding if it’s even possible that God can exist while suffering exists. That’s the side of the problem that we’re going to talk about first, which means we’re going to have to put on our thinking caps for a little bit and use the minds that God gave us.

Let’s go back for a minute and look at how Epicurus thought about the problem of evil. His entire argument comes down to a single sentence: it’s impossible for God and evil to exist at the same time. And we know without question that evil exists. We see it, we hear about it, we experience it. So because we know for certain that evil exists, then either there really isn’t a God, or there is a God, but he isn’t all-powerful (or else he would put a stop to evil), or he isn’t all-loving (or else he would have never let evil exist in the first place).

So how do we answer that problem in here, with our minds?

Whenever we’re thinking through a hard or confusing problem, there’s one thing that we absolutely have to be aware of if we ever hope to get to the truth. Philosophers call them presuppositions. We know them better as assumptions. It’s all those things that we assume to be true about whatever problem we’re trying to sort out, and we all have them. We all assume things, and that’s not good because most of those assumptions we take for granted are actually wrong.

When people say it’s impossible for God and evil to exist at the same time, there are two assumptions they make. One is that a God who is all-powerful can create any world he wants, including a world without evil. That sounds right, but is it? Because remember what we talked about a couple weeks ago with the question of whether we have free will or if God determines everything. It’s both, isn’t it? That’s what the Bible says. God controls everything, but you also have free will. Aside from Jesus himself, your free will is the greatest gift God has given you, because your freedom to choose gives you dignity. It means you can choose God. But free will also means that you can make the opposite choice and not choose God. You can refuse to do what God wants, and what is the result of that? It’s evil, isn’t it?

God is all-powerful — there is no doubt about that at all. The Bible makes that clear from Genesis 1:1 all the way to Revelation 22:21. But if God wants us to have free will, then he can’t just make any old world, he has to make one that includes our choices — which also means that he has to create a world where evil and suffering exist. That’s how important God considers your free will to be.

There’s another assumption in there. When you say it’s impossible for God and evil to exist at the same time, you’re also assuming that an all-loving God prefers a world without suffering. That sounds right too, doesn’t it? But again, is it? What if God has reasons of his own for allowing all the suffering in this world? What if that suffering brings about a greater good that wouldn’t be possible without that suffering?

An atheist could say, “Well, if God is all-powerful, then why couldn’t he bring about a greater good without needing suffering to do it?” Good question. But again, that might not be possible because we have free will.

So is it impossible for both God and evil to exist at the same time? No, it’s not impossible at all. The whole argument falls apart because of what it assumes. This is the world we have to have if God wants us to have free will. This is the best world possible if God wants us to feel hope and joy and laughter and meaning, but also have the free choice to either love him or ignore him. And for a long while now, most of the people in this world have chosen to ignore him. They don’t want a God they have to answer to, they just want to answer to themselves. They don’t want a God who says some things are wrong and other things are right. They want to do whatever they want. They don’t want a God who will judge them. They’d rather be the judge, both of themselves and of everyone else.

Instead of submitting to God, we go our own way. Humanity has been in a state of rebellion against God ever since Eden, and what’s the only thing that can result from that? Darkness. Evil. Suffering. We know that, don’t we? If there’s life with God, there can only be death without God. We should be saddened by the suffering in this world. We should be angered by it, and fight against it. But we should never be shocked by it, because evil and suffering is the only possible result of a world that wants nothing to do with God.

And people might say, “Well that’s fine, but it doesn’t explain why so much of the suffering in this world and so much of the suffering that I’m going through seems so pointless and so unnecessary.”

I understand that too, and they’re right — a lot of it does seem pointless and unnecessary. But there’s an important word in there that we have to pay attention to. It’s that word seems. It seems pointless to us, but what if it doesn’t seem that way to God? I hope we all know how limited we really are when it comes to thinks like intelligence and insight. Every day I’m reminded of just how much I don’t know and how much I don’t see. But is there anything God doesn’t know? Is there anything he doesn’t see?

Have you ever heard of chaos theory? Chaos theory is a big thing in science now because it touches on everything form physics to economics to biology. It’s very complicated and beyond me, but the general idea is that everything in creation is so connected to each other that one small action can create results that no one can see. The example that’s usually given is that a butterfly sitting on a twig of a tree in a forest in West Africa and flap its wings one time and set in motion a chain of events that results in a hurricane hitting the east coast of America. Small things that we miss make big consequences that we can’t even understand, and yet God not only knows it all, he controls it all.

Life is so unbelievably complex that we’ll never understand it all, and if we’re in a position where we can’t even understand the world, we’re in no position at all to judge what God does or doesn’t do. He sees the ending from the beginning. He is the great author. And just like any good author, God understands that the beginning of a story has to grab you and the middle of the story has to carry you along, but it’s the end that really matters. It’s the end that makes or breaks a story. God knows the end. He’s already written it. But for God to get us there, we have to put up with a great deal of suffering along the way.

But it’s worth it. God says the pain you endure and the suffering you go through is worth it, because he sees the end. He sees where all of history is heading, and he loves us so much that he’s given us glimpses of where it’s heading in the Bible. People can say it’s impossible there can be an all-loving and all-powerful God with all the evil in the world, but God says, “That’s just not true. Your problem is in your assumptions.” And the biggest assumption we have is that God’s goals for us are the same as ours.

Here’s the one thing you need to know, and it’s going to be tough to hear because there are too many preachers out there standing up every week to say the exact opposite — God’s purpose for your life is not to make you happy. I’m going to say that again — God’s purpose for your life is not to make you happy. It’s not to make you comfortable or rich. It’s not even to keep you healthy. God’s purpose for your life is for you to know him. Period. Because knowing him is true happiness. Knowing him is true peace. Knowing him is true meaning and joy.

Our biggest problem with evil and suffering is that they get in the way of our happiness, and that’s what we want most of all. We want to be happy. Prosperous. Safe. And those things are good, but they’re temporary. We want to be happy today and tomorrow. We want to be prosperous now. We want to be safe in this life. But God wants those things for us in their ultimate meaning. His focus isn’t on making us happy and prosperous and safe in this life alone, he wants us to enjoy those things for eternity. That’s what he’s after.

There are a lot of Christians in a lot of churches who don’t hear that anymore, and that’s not just sad, it’s a sin. Preaching about how God wants you to be rich and successful and healthy and you just need more faith will go over good in Beverley Hills. Not so much in North Korea. And let me tell you this, if the gospel you believe in can’t be preached in both Beverley Hills and North Korea, then it isn’t the true gospel.

God wants you to know him. That’s why he gave you life, to have a relationship with him that grows deeper and taller every day and finally blooms in eternity. He’s not just looking at your today. Not just at your tomorrow. He’s looking at your forever.

And that’s where we come to the heart. Answering the intellectual problem of evil is fine, and you need to know how to do that. You need to know about things like assumptions and free will and how we have a much more limited perspective than God does. They’ll come in handy when someone who isn’t a Christian starts asking you how you can believe in God given all the bad in the world.

But let me tell you something — none of that is going to help you one bit when evil and suffering come into your own life. All of that intellectual stuff is going to go right out the window. You’re going to need more than arguments, you’re going to need something to answer the pain in your heart. You’re going to need an answer to the question of, “God, if you really love me, why did you let this happen? Why didn’t you do this instead?”

That’s where Paul picks up in 2 Corinthians 4:16, when he writes, “So we do not lose heart.” The world can lose heart, and it does. But not us. Not you. That phrase “lose heart” doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the pain of suffering, or the sadness of hurt, or even the worry of evil. It means that we don’t give up. We don’t give up working to make the world better, and we especially don’t give up our faith because we can’t see the whole picture of our lives and the purpose behind our hurts.

As a Christian, you have something the world doesn’t. You have God as a friend. You have his Spirit working in and through your life. You have Christ himself standing in your place and giving you his strength. Your circumstances may weigh down on your heart and your mind so much that it feels like your body is wasting away, but Paul says the hurts of this world can’t touch your inward self, your soul, because that part of you was made for forever. In fact, what Paul’s saying in verse 16 is that suffering can even strengthen your soul. Your soul is being renewed day by day. It’s being strengthened, it’s being made brighter with grace and faith and hope by God.

How can this be? Michelangelo once said, “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.” The more weight that gets hung on a palm tree, the healthier that palm tree becomes. The more the children of Israel suffered in Egypt, the more they grew.

The closer we get to heaven, the less our problems in the world seem to matter. And that’s God’s goal. His purpose for your life is to get you ready for eternity. It’s to put you to work doing good and sharing the hope you have, and unfortunately that means sometimes you’re going to suffer. But especially in your suffering, you will be comforted. Even as your body decays, your soul is strengthened. It’s bursting at the seams to be free.

This is an easy thing to believe when things are going well in our lives. But when things get tough — when we come face-to-face with evil, when all the brightness goes out of our lives and we’re plunged into suffering, doubt is never far away. It’s always whispering in our ear — “Is God really there? Does God really care? Does God really love me? Because if all those answers are yes, then why is he letting me hurt this much?”

When your life takes that turn — and again, it will, I promise you that — it’s so important to keep in mind that God has a purpose for it. It might not be a purpose you like. It probably won’t be a purpose you know. But you have to believe it’s for your good. That’s where your faith is challenged. That’s where trust is born. And that’s why God sometimes allows that suffering to come, because if his real purpose for your life is to know him and to be in a relationship with him, suffering is often the best way to accomplish that.

God has a purpose for whatever hurt and pain you’re going through. But remember, you have free will. There are some people who go through awful suffering and lose their faith, and there are some people who find that enduring their troubles with God makes their faith a hundred times stronger. It all depends on how you choose to react to what’s happening in your life. God has a purpose, but whether his purpose is achieved all depends on how you respond to your suffering.

Look at verse 17: “For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison . . . ”

Imagine that. Imagine Paul looking back over everything he’s had to endure — the beatings, the imprisonments, the harm to both his body and his reputation — and calling them “light and momentary.” The Greek word for affliction means something that causes great unhappiness and suffering. How can Paul call that light?

Paul is absolutely not saying that the suffering we have to endure isn’t painful. Just the opposite. He’s saying take a moment and feel how deep your pain is. Feel how much it hurts. And then take another moment and think about heaven. We talked about heaven last week. Think about the glory that you’ll be a part of and the glory that you will finally be, and then weigh the two of them. When Paul uses that word weight in verse 17, that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about one of those old fashioned scales. He says if you put all your hurts on one side of those scales and the glory that’s waiting for you on the other, there’s no comparison at all. However much the world makes you suffer and whatever evil you have to endure, the joys that God has for you in heaven are immensely more.

Paul’s also absolutely not saying that your suffering doesn’t feel like it’s going to last forever, because it often does. But it won’t. Heaven is forever, not your suffering. The new earth is forever, not your pain. And the longer forever goes, the fainter your sufferings in this world are going to become.

Answering the problem of evil with your mind usually means looking at your assumptions, those things you take for granted without thinking about them. But answering the problem of evil with your heart always means looking past whatever suffering you might be going through and focusing on eternity. In verse 18, Paul calls that “looking to the things that are unseen” — “as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

In verse 17, Paul says that our suffering is preparing us for eternal glory. But here in verse 18, he’s saying that’s conditional. Your suffering might prepare you for eternal glory, or it might not. It’s up to you, because again — you have free will. It only works if you do one thing — if you look with faith and expectation to God and his promises. If you keep your eyes on heaven, your problems on earth are going to look a whole lot smaller. That’s the true secret of bearing your trials with patience. It’s keeping your eye on the eternal happiness that’s waiting for you, and to think about how light and momentary those troubles trials are when compared to eternity. That’s how we tackle the problem of evil with the heart.

So let’s put these two together, the head and the heart, and try to answer the problem of evil as Christians. Because you need both, remember, or our answer won’t be complete. Here are three parts you need to know:

First, evil isn’t a thing. Evil is not a being. The devil is a being, but remember that the devil was created as good — he was an angel. God creates all things, and all things God creates are good. So if evil is a thing, then that makes God the creator of evil, and that’s not the case at all. Evil is a wrong choice, like Eve biting the apple, or it’s the damage done by a wrong choice, which is all of history.

Second, the cause of every physical evil is spiritual evil. Our free will means that we can freely choose evil, and so the cause of every evil and suffering is sin. Someone might object to that and say, “Well if our free will comes from God, and our free will is what causes evil, then isn’t God the origin of evil?” No. We don’t say that parents are the origin of the bad choices their children commit. Their children are responsible for their own choices. God gives us a small share in his power with the freedom to choose, and there are always consequences to our choices, whether good or bad.

And lastly, and most importantly, you are able to endure the evil and suffering that comes to you because of one person — because of Christ. God’s love sent his Son to die for us and defeat evil once and for all. That’s the entire heart of the Christian story. The cross is God’s answer to the problem of evil. Our part is to repent, to believe, and to work with God in fighting evil with love.

We’ll never have a perfect answer to the problem of evil in this life. The point of the whole book of Job is that we just don’t know what God’s up to. That’s a hard lesson to learn, because it means that for as smart as we think we are, there’s still a mountain of ignorance in us. But on the other hand, isn’t it comforting to know that we can’t understand everything about God’s ways? A God we could completely know would be a God just like us, which would make him a God not worth worshipping at all.

That’s why we have to live with all the evil and suffering in our lives with the perspective of eternity. We have to see all of our troubles piled onto one side of heaven’s scale, and all the glory we’ll someday receive on the other. The weight of that glory is so great that our sufferings aren’t even worth comparing. That’s what we hold onto in both our bad times and our good. That’s what makes us Christians. Because the person who knows God, no matter what they suffer, can still say “God is good” simply because he knows God.

And if you’re ready to start truly knowing God, I’ll invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn. Let’s pray:

Father ours is such a beautiful world, such a lovely life, and yet so much of it is drowned in hurt and pain and suffering. Your word says the devil prowls like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. But still in the midst of all that suffering, you’re there. In the midst of all our pain, you lift us up into your loving arms. In the shadow of evil, you come to save us. Give us hearts to look past the darkness of this world to see the light of eternity waiting. Strengthen us with the glory that you will give us in heaven, glory that will be so immense and so lasting that the pains of this world are truly made light and momentary. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.