The Story of Reality Part III

Lost/Evil/Wrath

We continue on in our story of reality this morning.

Let’s recap quickly where we have been in the last couple weeks.

First, hopefully you have this down by now but we have four questions every worldview has to answer. What are they? Is there someone that think they know them all? Come up here and write the four questions out

Where did we come from? How did it all start, where did everything come from? (Origins)

What went wrong? How did it get messed up? Why is the world the way it is?

How is it made right? How do we fix it? What’s the solution?

How does it all end? What happens to everything?

And from a Christian worldview we have answers to all four of these. Can someone write out those four answers?

Creation

Fall

Redemption

Restoration

And we have covered in the last couple weeks Creation and into the Fall. We talked about how either something, someone, or neither something or someone created the earth. And the answer is that ...... someone created everything and that person was....God.

We talked about how God is not creation, he created the sun and the moon and the stars and the plants and the animals and none of those things are worthy to be praised or worshipped because they are the creation not the creator.

And then we covered how God made his crown jewel, man, who he put over all other created things. He was still under God, but above all other things.

Last week we covered two terms that are true of all men:

Beautiful. There is inherit beauty in all mankind because they are men. And where does that value come from? They are created in the image of God.

And because of this there was two outflows of being created in the image of God, two results, does anyone remember that?

a) You are worth protecting. All human life is worth protecting because they are image bearers of the king.

b) The fact that God is imprinted on our hearts makes friendship with God possible.

Whats the second word we discussed last week?

2. Broken. Man is beautiful but they are broken. This brokenness is not a result of society, education, money, genetics, etc. This is a result of sin—we are broken.

Today we are going to dive deeper into this problem of what went wrong? How did we get here and what exactly is the outlook of the situation. We are going to really survey this step here (What went wrong) because if you don’t begin to wrap your mind around not only what event caused this but also the implications of that event, then you can’t understand or appreciate the solution.

If you don’t grasp where you are at and what you are able to and unable to in this state then you don’t and won’t understand what was really done to make it right. We are going to cover how it is made right next week but you have to understand why the world is the way it is for you to really comprehend the solution.

Picture this, you go to the doctor with a broken finger. You are going in to get some tests done and discuss treatment. Should they splint it, does it need surgery, is a pin necessary. Those are really the options, perhaps amputation in severe case but that’s why your there and thats what your expecting.

Now imagine the doctor does these tests and comes in and says you need surgery now and they take you in. Now you wake up and they have removed one of your lungs, part of your liver and one of your kidneys. What in the world? I have a broken finger? Where did all my organs go. Not only that, there are life altering consequences of removing those things. Your life will be hard and again you just want to fix your finger!

Perhaps your thinking there was some grave mistake. Perhaps they mixed up the patients in the operating rooms and they did all this on the wrong person. Some poor guy in the other OR went in expecting lose half his organs only to have his finger repaired. What a mistake, you will never be able to run again. Without a fully functioning liver you can’t handle certain medication, you won’t produce enough bile to break down fats and wastes or produce cholesterol. Your kidney no longer can filter through toxins in your blood as its supposed to. Your life is totally changed, you probably will be on medication and treatments to do all these things artificially. You perhaps can never go on airplane again because of blood clotting issues. You can struggle with stairs and long walks. Wow! Serious consequences and I just wanted my finger fixed!

But what if it wasn’t a mistake at all. The doctor did the right tests. It wasn’t the wrong OR. No, the doctor when examining your finger and vitals noticed something. The bloodwork came back and you have cancer. It started in your lung and spread to your liver and then to your kidney. See the doctor wasn’t crazy, your finger didn’t matter, your body was killing itself and without drastic intervention, you would be dead. Fixing the finger would only allow you to die a painful death with all your digits. The physician had a handle on the severity of the problem and once the patient could comprehend the magnitude of the issue, only then could he understand the necessity of the solution.

There is something terribly wrong with this world. This is not how its supposed to be. That story I just talked about where cancer spreads through the body, that happens, and that happens to children. It happens to God-fearing men and women. People with lots of money die terrible deaths. People living in extreme poverty are senselessly murdered. Well educated children are raped and beaten and trafficked. It doesn’t matter the economic status or education or geographic location; something is wrong with the world!

There is a certain beauty about human beings that sets us apart from everything else. Man is beautiful, but we are broken.

And only the Christian Story of reality explains all this adequately. All other religions try and fail to explain what happened. They all miss the mark on who God is and what he has done and they all come up short with just how bad man messed up.

Reincarnation, paganism, catholhism, they all fail to understand what exactly man has done. See if they knew who God was and what the standard was and really knew how far man had fallen short then all the other things we worship, all the works we accumulate pail in comparison to what the problem is.

Let’s give an example. How are the richest people you can think of?

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) $194B

Elon Musk (Tesla) $184B

Bill Gates (Microsoft) $131B

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) $130B

Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) $101B

Larry Ellison (Oracle) $117B

Larry Page (Google) $115B

Sergey Brin (Google) $112B

Alice Walton (Walmart) $61B (same for her siblings)

Total they equal about $1.1 Trillion dollars.

Think of all the things that group of people can do. They can go to space!

That group would have to take there net worth 28 times what they currently have to pay off the national debt. They have all these resources we are amazed and they can do so much but when you look at the price that has to be paid it pails in comparison.

“God gave the first man, Adam, a home perfectly suited to his natural needs. He gave him a friend, Eve, to be his proper companion, an able helpmate by his side to share his life with. He gave them rule over the land and its beasts and gave them a meaningful task: to be fruitful, multiply, subdue…with all of that, God gave them something else that was more important than the whole world now at their feet. God gave them himself in friendship. “

The world was perfect, and not in the way we think of. It wasn’t filled with legos and video games and candy and pizza and absent of chores and homework and bedtimes. No this perfect world is what our hearts have always longed for. The longing itself is a clue for us—an ache in our hearts reminding us of the way things used to be, a sign that we were made for something better—though, for the moment, we have lost our way—and hunger for the world to be that way again.

The Story says God has put eternity on our hearts. We are subtly reminded of a world the way it started, good, wonderful, whole, complete.

There was no conflict, no toil, no tears, no anguish, no suffering, no dissatisfaction. There were no barriers between Adam and Eve or between them and their King.

And yet things changed.

There was a single restriction, one prohibition placed in the garden, a single boundary to friendship between Father and children. What was it?

They could eat from any tree but one!

And at this point we are introduced to another character. He tells them the King cannot be trusted. God’s love is not real, it is not worthy. Don’t listen to him! Make your own rules. Go for what you really want. Break free from these chains! Be like God!

The serpent tested---”Did God really say this?” “If you eat this you will be like God” (Genesis 3)

The issue is not that they didn’t keep the rules. This isn’t a game. The problem is they broke the trust of their friend and their King.

And this, changes everything!

Remember the lure here—it will bring freedom, autonomy—you will be a king! Instead it brought brokenness, disgrace, guilt, slavery, and struggle.

Their harmony was shattered—they turned on each other. They blamed each other and others. And now man will struggle in his work, it will be hard. The woman struggles with child birth and clashes with the man who now rules her.

They wanted freedom and God status but they got anguish, suffering, trials and tears. And in the end you die. In the end, the final result of the fall is that one day we all lost this battle. We are racing against time and decay and one day it will win.

And through the decision of our first parents, we are doomed. Human race has sinned. We have rebelled and we are lost. We are now at war with the King.

And with that comes evil.

And see evil is a problem few can explain.

I’m going to just read from the book here because it sums it up much better than I can.

“Here is the problem. First, God must be a very weak sovereign if he wanted to keep order in his own Kingdom but could not prevent rebellion, either in the beginning or now. Second, it might be he is not weak t all. Maybe he is perfectly capable of preventing the evil, but is indifferent to the pain, the suffering, and the injusitice now rampant on the earth. in that case, he would be strong, but he would not be good. At first glance this seems like an impossible situtation for the Christian Story, so much so that some are tempted to think a good and powerful God simply does not exist.”

Getting rid of God because bad things happen does not solve anything. it doesn’t address the worlds brokenness and it certainly doesn’t help fix it. A lack of God cannot even comprehend even the idea of broken let alone evil.

Let me be clear, God is not weak or indifferent.

This Story present God as being omnipotent (what does that mean?) He has unlimited power, all powerful.

Omnipotence means possessing all power---but it doesn’t mean meeting any challenge.

<bring up a girl to bend paperclip into square>

<bring up a guy to bend paperclip into a circle>

<ask that guy to bend it into a square circle>

There are some things power cannot accomplish. It does not take much strength to bend a paperclip into a square or into a circle. But no amount of strength can bend it into a square circle.

Square circles are like married bachelors—they are a contradiction. When we say God can do anything that is true in one sense but he also cannot contradict. He cannot lie. He cannot overlook justice. He cannot sin.

Is it possible that God might have a good reason to allow evil? Is there a possible circumstance when someone good allows something bad even when he could prevent it?

The book uses two examples that are good.

Imagine a spy in world war II. He has stuck behind enemy lines and is posing as a German officer. And his mission is to destroy the gas chamber. And during that mission he witnesses them preparing to execute a prisoner. Now he can stop it yes, save that prisoners life possibly. But then he would be ousted—they would no the hack amongst them. His mission is to save thousands of lives.

Now you will never be in that situation.

But what about this. A parent who has decided there kid’s need to get their shots. And the child is crying, fearful, knowing it will be painful. You don’t want to put them through it. But you believe that if they endure the pain of the shot then they will avoid the far greater pain of whatever sickness you are preventing. The pain is temporary and can help avoid something far greater like chicken pox or shingles.

God is not obligated by his goodness to use his power to prevent all evil in every circumstance but may have a morally sufficient reason to allow it in some cases.

“Precisely because God is good, he wanted to share his happiness with others. So he created humans with the kind of freedom and the kind of nature that would allow them to grow in goodness, deepening their happiness and their friendship with God. Since happiness depends on goodness, man had freedom to choose the good, but the same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. Precisely because God is good he made a creature that could go bad. And there is no other way around it. No freedom, no growth in goodness. No growth in goodness, no growth in happiness. So God’s own goodness is no longer on the chopping block.”

“Neither is his power…it would be impossible for God to create man with genuine moral liberty without any possibility that man would use it for ill. It would be like a square circle.”

So we may ask why. We may ask was the goodness that results good enough to risk and we have seen the evil that comes with it. I’ll tell you sometimes we dont know or cant’t explain.

“Consider this, if someone asked if there was a live elephant in the room, that would be pretty easy to answer. If they asked if there was a flea in the room, that would be pretty difficult. It one landed on your leg and bit you, then you’d know obviously. But if you never found a single flea even if you looked carefully, that doesn’t mean none were there.”

There are some things we are in a good position to answer---like if there is an elephant in the room. Some things are not—like is there a flea---or was it worth it? We may never know if that freedom was worth the price of the evil.

Here is what we do know—man did not use his freedom well. God gives commands for reasons. When we disobey, we break something valuable. When God’s children disobeyed their heavenly Father, they damaged everything. When Adam and Eve rebelled agains the King of the universe, they broke the whole world.

Every evil that assaults us is the result of rejecting God’s rule.

And see God would not be good if he truly hated evil bust was benign toward those who consistently cause it. justice means exacting payment for the crime. No payment—no justice. Not justice—no goodness. There must be a payment for that rule breaking.

God’s goal with man is friendship but its really hard, even impossible, to be friends with someone who is constantly egregiously offending you. Man must pay but he is unable to pay. He must be freed, but like slaves, we cannot free ourselves.

I want to close with two things.

Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil—they are all part of the Story.

The Story is not over yet.