Untitled Sermon (6)

On a day in October, when I was twenty-one, my father suffered a major heart attack and fell dead to the ground in the breakroom at work. During the 20 years leading up to that day, Death existed as a vague surreal concept; something foreign that does not occur too close to home. I knew, cognitively, that we are all going to die one day, but not until death dipped its cold tendrilous fingers into my mind did I begin contemplating my own mortality. I believe that when the serpent lied to eve, telling her that surely she would not die, we spend most of our lives eating from the forbidden tree and believeing the lie - until one day when we are all broadsided by reality. The phone call i recieved that day is seared in my mind forever. My mother's shrill and panicked voice crying out, "he's dead," caused my body go limp as I fell into a tear laden heap on the ground. I spent the next several months replaying what I imaged his coworkers witnessed; the searing heat of pain accosting his left arm as he clawed at his arrested heart with the right; his tense body convulsing on the floor as the onlookers were helplessly trying to save my dying fading life.

This past Sunday, my wife received a similar call. My father-in-law has been suffering from an aggressive form of cancer that spread from his lungs into his brain. When her phone buzzed errily on our bedside table, I knew before she answered that my wife was about to experience what I endured many years ago. She was about to be confronted with her morality. In many ways, I experienced the death of my father twice. I was close to Charlie, and as I witnessed the descent of a strong, proud man, into an inept, broken shell; emptied of personal dignity. He sounded like a child when I called him the day before his death.

After we learned about Charlie's cancer, I tried to council my wife using every logical formula that I hoped would remedy her sorrow and give her peace. She half-listened and appeased me with half-hearted head nods. I so desperately wanted her mind to override her heart and allow for her suffering to a swift end. All she really wanted was for me was to hold her and let my lips grow silent. It many ways, our shared faith in Jesus Christ is an intellectual faith, and I have been training my self not to allow my emotions and passions to override my mind. I wanted to be the voice of reason that would quell the hurt – that petty volatile emotion.

The Problem of Evil by far the most significant stumbling block to faith. C.S. Lewis said this after the death of his wife, "When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing [God]… you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face." How many people feel the cold wisp of a shutting door when they are in the hour of desperation? Why can I not hear Him speak? Why doesn't He just do something? How can an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God allow for Evil to persist in the world He created?

Pain and suffering is the universal common ground for believers and unbelievers alike. We all experience pain caused by this broken, fallen world. Therefore, if God exists, either he doesn't care, and then He is not all good, or he doesn't know, and then he is not all-wise, or he isn't able to, and he is not all-powerful. In any case, the God of Christianity, the God of the Bible, the God millions believe in, is a myth. The facts of life prove that. Don't they? These facts stand sentinel in the way of faith for many unbelievers today. The easiest way to deal with the complexity of this issue is to deny the existence of God and raise man in His stead. Man is the measure; we are responsible for the abolition of wickedness on earth! We will not tolerate intolerance, we will evolve and overcome. It is man's ultimate manifest destiny.

An apparent inconsistency creates the problem of Evil among four propositions: The first being that 1) God exists, That 2) God is all-powerful, and 3) He is all-good, but 4) Evil exists. In other words, if God existed and He is said to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent, they evil would not exist without undermining God's nature. The secular humanist or atheists deny the first proposition. They deal with the problem by denying God's existence – by claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man (Romans 1:22). Indeed, they have made themselves out to be the answer – either through politics or pop psychology or sociology or some combination of all three – they trust in their finite wisdom to guide them to an explanation of suffering and death.

For secular humanism to have its way, we must presume that man is born with a clean slate. We are not born with a sinful nature, but the our environment forms the "sinful-like" characteristics. Just change the setting, and you will change the person. It is true that the environment a child is raised in causes him or her to either suppress their sinning or to encourage it. But the concept that man is born with a clean slate leaves much to be desired. What about those who have "good" homes and still turn out bad? Those protocol sons who have been spoiled by their parent's wealth and squander it on bodily pleasures: addictions, sexual perversions, and myriads of self-indulgences. Secular humanism is a lie, and it does nothing to prevent pain and suffering. Ask victims of school shootings if they believe that the world is a better place! And we can ask those questions because pain and suffering is a common denominator!

Those who retreat into pantheism do not deny the existence of God but make him consist of everything; he is the metaphyical blob that does not give being but consumes being. We are all God, but we are unaware. Pain and suffering are coextensive with goodness – like yin and yang or the light and dark side- all human passions are an illusion. The Buddhists deny the fourth proposition, the reality of Evil. Pain and suffering are illusions, and the quicker one realizes this, the faster he will achieve enlightenment. According to pantheism, the delusions of being somebody is the only thing that has ever happened. Nobodies have been thinking they are somebodies throughout all of non-time (Oh, they believe that time is an illusion as well). The Problem of Evil isn't with Evil itself; it's thinking that Evil exists at all.

After my dad died, I fell headlong into many bad ideas, including the two that I just mentioned. I read the book Dharma Bums in my early twenties and became a "Zen Buddist." But I was a Zen Buddist like Ray Smith in the novel– I was just an idealistic alcoholic. I did not deal with my father's death; I ran from it. I would accept any alternative other than actually dealing with the pain I was feeling. I believe that is why we encounter such widespread acceptance of bad ideas. The bad Ideas that contradict the nature of reality and damn people to a Christless eternity. People who are hurting and don't want to face the cause of their pain; they skip their doctor's appointments, to avoid the diagnosis. But the Problem with Evil is that we all have the same prognosis: death. Author Henry David Thoreau wrote somewhere that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Before we delve into trying to solve this paradox, I would like you to remember that all people suffer. The people we debate with are broken like we were before we bent our knee at the cross. They are angry and confused and scared. Having empathy is not enough. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But we are to be compassionate. To have compassion is to come alongside someone and suffer through the pain with them. My wife did not need my empathy but my compassion. She desired me to suffer with her. If we are to reach the lost with Christ, we must be compassionate. We are not concerned with merely winning the argument, but winning the person to Christ.

There is another alternate view concerning the Problem of Evil, and it involves some people who actively serve in the church and do believe in a theistic God. When they are confronted with evil run away and invent a therapeutic god. Rabbi Harold Kushner had to say this about the God he began to reinvent. "I believed that I was following God's ways and doing his work. How could this be happening to my family," he lost his son Arron to a rare disease. He aged prematurely, looked like an old man by the time he was a teenager, and died in his before reaching his twentith birthday. Kushner wondered, "if God existed, if he was minimally fair, let alone loving and forgiving, how could he do this to me? And even if I could persuade myself that I deserve this punishment for some sin of neglect or pride that I was not aware of, on what grounds did Aaron have to suffer?" To Kushner it is fatalism to call everything, including the death of his son, the will of God. Fatalism affirms God's power at the expense of God's goodness. Such a God cannot be loved. Kushner's God can. His God is not the omnipotent Creator and miracle worker of the Bible, but some vague, undefined force within nature and subject to nature's laws. His God is not responsible for Evil; his God is not omnipotent but impotent. That is a tremendous advantage. The fact that millions of Christians and Jews loved Kushner's book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, it probably shows that they were fatalist, deeply imbued with the idea of obeying this tyrannical God, and needed Kushner to help them to lose their false faith. They exchanged their false impression of God for a naturalistic, false god; they exchanged power for love.

When Harold Kushner faced the Problem of Evil, he reimaged a god that can suffer with him, a god who is just as fallible as the rest of humanity. Obviously, he is wrong, along with the millions of followers he took along with him, but we shouldn't hate him for it. He watched his son suffer a lifetime of ailments in a few short years. The people who followed him are the types of people we will encounter during our evangelism efforts. Before we speak the truth, we must first show compassion. We must love the enemies of the faith. Otherwise, we will just be adding another brick to the wall of sorrow that surrounds their hearts.

Now, before we formally confront the Problem of Evil we must define some terms. In philosopher Peter Kreeft's book Making Sense Out of Suffering, he explains the three basic kinds of Evil. The first is suffering, which is disharmony or alienation between ourselves as embodied creatures and something in the physical world. Disharmony can be disease or injury, and alienation can be the denial of what is essential for survival or the inability to satisfy a need. The next kind of Evil is death, which is the disharmony, alienation, or separation between the soul and the body—the shared experience of death among all people. The final kind of Evil is sin, which is the disharmony or alienation between the soul and God. Sin leads to death as the apostle Paul states in Romans 6:23, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

After we understand how to represent Evil, we must then understand that God is not the cause of iniquity; that only good things come from God. In the book of Genesis, after God created the world and filled it with His creatures, He declared it was good! He does not mean that the created world is morally good; a tree or a dog cannot be morally good. He meant good in a metaphysical sense, that what he created was perfect. Then what is evil? Evil is defined as the privation of goodness. It acts as a parasite on an host or rust in a car. It is what corrupts the good. Evil is not a substance; it does not exist in itself. It exists in another. God did not create Evil; He created free-willed creatures capable of choosing other than the good; morality exists because free will exists. God created the standard of goodness and revealed it to us in our conscience. But, He also gave us the ability to act contrary to conscience which revealed His Standard. In one way or another, all the Evil in the world can be traced back to Adam's singular sinful act. Humans, not God, are responsible for all the evil present in the world. The wages of sin is death.

When we present the Gospel to people, we are trying to change their perspective of reality. They do not know they are guilty. They do not think they are responsible for their actions . The public school system has brought us into an era of self-righteousness. The psychologists tell us to love themselves more – which we already do – and to feel entitled to the God-given rights that we believe do not actually come from God. Suffering is to be avoided and pleasure to be sought. They replace the greater good with good enough. we live pragmatic lives and attribute all our blessings to ourselves. Life is hardly lived - it is more like a spiritual slumber. But, when tragedy befalls us, and we are awakened from our sleep, we either turn to God in repentance, or we point their fingers at Him and ask why! God is not the author of Evil, but He uses it to bring people to Himself. One of the most famous verses in the book of Romans explains to those who chose God over themselves that He uses evil in their lives to bring about the good for those who love Him. It is like the sculptor who chips away at the stone to reveal the masterpiece inside.

If we were to put the Problem of Evil in the syllogistic form, it would read something like this: If God is all-good, He would destroy evil; If God all-powerful, He could destroy evil; but evil is not destroyed; therefore no such God exists. The Problem of Evil often presented in this way using so many words. The atheist looks at evil and denies God. The Pantheist looks at evil and rejects evil. The process theologian posits that God is not all-powerful or all-knowing; therefore, he is not responsible for evil. But, how does the orthodox Christian make sense of this argument? Norman Geisler would say that this syllogism requires some modification. Orthodox Christianity agrees that God is all-good and that He is all-powerful (there is no contradiction, both of these premises can be true of God at the same time). We would agree that an omnipotent God can destroy evil. It is the third premise that needs modification. But evil is not yet destroyed. The supernatural virtue of hope that true believers have instilled in them, by God, gives rise to a living hope that God will do what He says He is going to do in the Bible. As Christians, we are awaiting the just judge, Jesus Christ, to return and put an end to all suffering and evil in the world. In the meantime, we are given the faith to believe that Christ's death and resurrection have wiped away our sin debt, and we are imbued with the supernaturual selfless love allows us come to the aid of people who are presently suffering.