Answers to Evil
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
It’s safe to say that evil is a daily reality. We see it on the news, we hear about it from our friends, we read about it in our bibles, and worst of all - we experience it ourselves.
The very existence of evil, pain, and suffering has lead more than one to ask: Why?
If God is all powerful, he should be able to stop evil, and if God is all good then he should want to stop evil. But evil is still here.
Which leads people to some different conclusions:
God isn’t powerful enough to stop evil
God isn’t good if he lets evil continue
Or maybe there isn’t a God period
For plenty of people these are the only answers. So it’s not the question of evil, but the problem of evil. The question is answered by one of these three. It’s a problem for God, or for those who believe in one, to face this argument and still believe in the God we read of in scripture.
The Goal
The Goal
The goal for this morning is to look at evil thorough a biblical lens. We’re not going to answer why you specifically had to suffer, or why those kids in Minnesota were murdered while praying. But ideally we’re going to intellectually answer why a good God might permit evil. If we’re ever in a conversation with an atheist or agnostic who raises evil as an objection to God - we want to give some reasonable answers.
And we also want to know how we can persevere through evil when it comes knocking on our door, and how we can comfort those who are going through it themselves. The last thing we want is to be like Job’s three friends who were called ‘miserable comforters’ because they spoke form a place of ignorance.
Answering Moral Evil
Answering Moral Evil
There are two types of evil that we’re concerned with. The first is moral evil.
This is evil caused by other people - murder, rape, abuse, insults, gossip, division, you name it. In the face of all these evil people doing evil things, why doesn’t God create us in a way that prevents these evils, or why doesn’t God simply wave his hand and obliterate them all?
Free Will
Free Will
One of the most common answers, you’re likely thinking it right now, is that evil is a necessary consequence of free-will.
In the beginning, everything was good!
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
God did not create evil, he only created what was good. Yet, in creating and defining good he defined what evil was. Anything outside of that narrow definition of good is by its very nature not good - evil.
And God didn’t create us like robots, pre-programmed to love and obey at every turn. He gave us the freedom to choose or reject his goodness.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Eden was a paradise where man lived without sin, but not without temptation. Eden was a sort of proving grounds. God has created everything that was good and defined what was good for man - tending the garden, eating from any tree they wanted, and not eating from this tree.
The name of the forbidden tree itself, The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, points to man being able to choose for himself to accept God’s goodness or define it on his own. In Genesis 24:50 we see this ‘good and evil’ terminology being used by Laban.
50 Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said, “The thing has come from the Lord; we cannot speak to you bad or good.
He’s speaking to Abraham’s servant who has come to find a wife for Isaac. He prayed “Let the woman you want me to take back do all of these things” and sure enough Rebekah does all of those things. So Laban is convinced - the decision is out of our hands, God has spoken his will so we can’t speak good or evil about it.
But God did give man a decision in the garden. Are you going to let God define good and evil, or are you going to know, to deicide, good and evil for yourself?
God wants us to make a free choice to follow him - that’s what makes any relationship so special. There was another guy trying to hit up Arianne while we were dating but she chose me!
What if there’s love but no choice?
AI seems to be everywhere these days - even in some people’s love lives. You can go on a website and customize your perfect AI lover - their appearance, style, personality, sense of humor, and everything else. So people have created their perfect lovers.
But is lover an appropriate word? That AI model isn’t choosing you, you’re choosing it to be exactly what you want it to be. And one of the things that people love about them is that they’ll never choose anybody else. They have to be with me!
Do we want to compare our relationship with God to a sad man talking to a computer and calling it love?
God allows evil because he wants authentic love. He wants to be chosen.
For Our Own Good
For Our Own Good
But we choose pretty poorly, don’t we?
People don’t just reject God, they reject him in favor of so many horrible things.
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
So why doesn’t God just wipe them out if they deserve death?
Wouldn’t it be great if God just eradicated every source of evil?
Every cancer cell eradicated
Every tornado squashed
Every evil person righteously smited by his judgment
That would be good! Right?
Where would you be if God decided to to stop all evil? You would have had a lightning bolt up in heaven with your name on it!
It’s easy to look at other people and their evil and say they deserve it. Paul starts the good news of the gospel in Romans by condemning all of those evil people. And then he reminds us that we’re those evil people.
1 Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.
Paul writes about “them” in Romans 3 but it’s useful to personally put me and you in that passage.
10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands; no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” 13 “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” 14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 in their paths are ruin and misery, 17 and the way of peace they have not known.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
If God didn’t allow evil, but struck it down the moment it became possible, then this story would have wrapped up a long time ago.
But he didn’t. Instead we get to experience a side of God that we never would have without the possibility of evil - God’s grace.
God will judge evil one day, but before he eradicates it, he wants to redeem it.
9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
That word patient isn’t just the ability to be bored. The big Greek dictionaries define it more specifically as bearing up while being provoked. We’re not the only one’s who suffer evil - God does to. He wants to do something about it, but he doesn’t want anyone to perish - he wants them to repent and turn from evil.
He wants to give evil people a chance to be good.
For God’s Glory
For God’s Glory
You put these two ideas together:
Evil is possible so we can choose God
Evil is possible because it make grace possible
And it ultimately leads, I believe, to God’s glory.
God is glorified when we reject evil
God is glorified when we put our faith in him for salvation
God is glorified when redeeming us from evil
God is glorified when he judges evil
Answering Non-Moral Evil
Answering Non-Moral Evil
But that’s only half the picture. We have moral evil and we also have non-moral evil.
Cancer is a bad thing. It’s bad when tornados and hurricanes destroy entire towns and kill people. I have a bad tooth that needs a root-canal. Nobody caused those bad things - they just stink.
So why does God allow those things to happen? The bible gives us some possibilities.
Punishment
Punishment
It could be a punishment.
When Egypt suffered the 10 plagues it wasn’t just random happenstance. Pharaoh refused to listen to God so he brought the stick. This is what happens when you oppress God’s people and refuse to listen to God!
Abel’s blood cried from the ground it was spilt on, and we shouldn’t assume that God doesn’t hear the voice of the oppressed today. Sin cries out for judgment, and sometimes what we consider evil might actually be a punishment.
Correction
Correction
But we shouldn’t assume that every bad thing means that God hates us.
Israel suffered from an intense famine and hunger during the days of Amos. Was it because God hated them?
6 “I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord. 7 “I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; one field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither; 8 so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and would not be satisfied; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord. 9 “I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord. 10 “I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord. 11 “I overthrew some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord.
These bad things happening weren’t caused by people, it wasn’t random chance, and it wasn’t because God hated Israel. It’s because he wanted to bring his people back to him. He was essentially saying “Look, if you want to reject me this is what life is like without me. Life dries up and stinks.” And the hope is that Israel would realize how awful things are without God and come back to him.
Sometimes we suffer pain because we’re being disciplined by God, humbled by God. Sometimes we need a taste of life without God so we can get a good look at how insufficient we are. Sometimes we need to be kicked into action.
Dad wasn’t too interested in having bible studies at age 17. I give God the glory for throwing him out of a moving truck and splitting his head open so he would think about life a little bit more and turn to God as a result.
Broken World
Broken World
And at other times we might need to wonder if God had anything to do with the pain we suffer. We ought to attribute suffering to the broken world we live in.
Pain is the worst, but it’s useful. It means somethings wrong. Hey, take a look at your toe! Keep smacking it into the door like that and it might fall off!
Evil tells us that there’s something wrong with creation. It’s what the book of Ecclesiastes struggles with. Life should work one way.
Good people should prosper
Bad people should fail and be punished
The strong should prevail, the quick should win the race
11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
The world doesn’t operate by the rules that it should be. And it’s because it’s broken. Sin didn’t just make us guilty and kill us, it broke the whole system.
That’s the implication of what Paul says in Romans 8:20-21
20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
Ecclesiastes uses that catchword “vanity” throughout the book. Everything is vanity, everything is absurd, futile, broken. In Hebrew it’s hevel but when it was translated into Greek they used the word mataiotes. Paul is using the same word here - futility. It wasn’t created in futility, but subjected unwillingly to it.
But creation itself has the same hope we do of being redeemed.
Until then, we have to put up with that futility - that brokenness.
Summary
Summary
Some biblical explanations of evil:
God’s Glory
Free will
God’s grace
Correction
Judgment
Discipline
Broken World
Application
Application
It’s easy to look at some of those answers as satisfactory from a distance. It’s easy to look at somebody else’s suffering and think “Oh, here are these answers that rationally answer why bad things are happening.” It’s different when you’re the one suffering though. We can’t rationalize away the pain of suffering and assume that knowing the right information somehow makes the pain of a dying child go away.
So when we’re in the midst of pain or comforting others who are in it, I think we need to have a few thoughts in mind.
Think Like Job
Think Like Job
When suffering we ought to think like Job.
When we suffer we inevitably ask “Why me?” Why is God taking my child away, why is he giving me back pain, why is he surrounding me with so many trials? And this can create bitterness and we start to point the finger at God “How dare you do this to me!”
That’s how Job felt.
1 Then Job answered and said: 2 “Today also my complaint is bitter; my hand is heavy on account of my groaning. 3 Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! 4 I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments.
Job sees no reason for his suffering and so he wants to find God and argue with him. Job is ready to fight God on this.
It sounds odd, but suffering is a great opportunity for the sin of pride and narcissism.
Again, the protest is “How dare you do this to me!” And when we complain to God (which by the way he does allow) we can assume this self-righteous posture and tell God that he’s messing things up. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and we need to set him straight. We get angry in our suffering and tell God that’ it’s not about his will but our will be done. Enough of this pain!
And that’s when God shows up:
6 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: 7 “Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. 8 Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
God has some questions for Job.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Who determined the limits of the sea?
Who causes the dawn every morning?
Have you walked the ocean depths?
Have you witnessed the wonders of creation?
God’s answer to Job cause him to say:
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’ It is I—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me.
It’s easy to see God’s response to Job as “You don’t know anything! So shut up and sit down.” I take it more as “You don’t know anything! But God does, so trust him.”
We need to be humble in our sufferings and trust that despite all appearances, Romans 8:28 is still true.
28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Job never finds out why he suffered - and we won’t either.
Don’t Always try to Find the Silver Lining
Don’t Always try to Find the Silver Lining
With that in mind, don’t always try to find the silver linings in suffering or God’s purpose in bad times. We don’t know enough
To condemn suffers as being punished or corrected
To know if it really is simply the effect of a broken world
To tell a person in the midst of suffering that we, from a distance, have it all figured out
This was the mistake that Job’s three friends made. They had his suffering all figured out. Job calls them all miserable comforters and God condemns them for their foolishness.
Applying these answers to suffering takes wisdom, a lot of maybe’s, and more “I don’t know” then sometimes we care to admit. It’s arrogant to assume that we can know God’s plans and exactly how he is using someone else’s pain.
And on the flip side it’s arrogant of us to assume that God isn’t doing anything with that suffering just because we can’t make sense of it.
Look Towards Hope
Look Towards Hope
And finally, we need to always look forward to the end of pain and the hope that God has for us.
That paradox we started with:
God is all powerful and all good
An all powerful and all good God would want to stop evil
Evil hasn’t been stopped
Therefore God is either not all powerful, all good, or even real
There’s one complication with this logic, no. 3 - Evil hasn’t been stopped yet.
But we believe that God first proclaimed the gospel in Genesis 12:3 when he announced that all nations would be blessed through Abraham.
We believe that the cross is God’s answer to pain and suffering - that he suffered and died for us so that we could have the hope of heaven.
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
This world of sin, death, mourning, crying, and pain is all passing away. We’re waiting for a new heavens and a new earth where God will wipe away all of our tears.
This leads Paul to write
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
What’s 80 years of pain and suffering in the face of eternity in heaven? Will you be bitter about your pain here on earth after 100 trillion years in heaven? (That’s on the lower side of eternity by the way). We look past the pain to see the prize of heaven.
Conclusion
Conclusion
So what are you going to do with your pain?
Point the finger at God?
Raise your angry fist at him?
People who do that don’t have any hope.
In the face of evil, pain, and suffering we need to give God the glory - I trust in you no matter how bad things seem. I believe that God will make things better.
But here’s the catch - if you’re not a child of God, not baptized into his body, not living a life that demonstrates faith in him - then things aren’t going to get better. You will live a life of pain and suffering that will be ultimately meaningless. And when you die you won’t escape suffering. Hell is worse.
So I am begging you: chose hope. Chose God.
