Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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This is not the message I planned to preach
Mark DiQuattro - led Bible study, brilliant man loved the Word and loved God, was loved by all
Wednesday night, I received a call from Joe that Mark had taken a turn for the worse.
My wife could tell from my end of the conversation that it was not a good phone call that I was on.
When I hung up, she asked me what was wrong, and I said through my tears “Mark is not doing well.
I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
And she kind of sunk in her chair and closed her eyes and said softly “I don’t understand.”
When I got the call on Friday and I called my wife to let her know, she again could only say “I don’t understand.”
When Joe spoke words of encouragement to the men’s group yesterday, he said “I don’t understand, but I’m trusting God.”
Those are three words that define life in a fallen world as a Christian perhaps better than any other: I don’t understand.
And I don’t understand.
I don’t understand why things happen the way they do.
I don’t understand why God heals some but not others.
I don’t understand why God allows some suffering to happen but steps in and stops other suffering.
Like the prophet Jeremiah or Solomon in Proverbs ask, I often find myself wondering why sometimes the wicked prosper and yet sometimes the righteous suffer.
How many times have we all struggled to understand how God could allow situations to play out the way they do?
Especially when someone we love is sick, or gets hurt, or worse…
And yet we come here every week and we say “God is good…all the time.”
And I have no doubt that we mean it when we say it.
God is good all the time.
But how do we reconcile the goodness of a sovereign God with a dear brother in Christ who has faithfully served God getting so sick and being taken away?
How do we reconcile God’s goodness with all that we have been through as a church in recent history?
How is God good all the time, and yet a brilliant preacher of the Gospel like Ed Banghart, who loves God so much is stricken with a disease that leaves him unable to speak well enough to preach?
How is God good all the time, and yet a good man like Dean Temple, a steadfast believer - an elder, a lover of God and a pillar in our church - is taken away and leaves a hole in our church that can never be filled?
How can we still believe God is good, when we don’t understand why He allows such suffering - such loss - such…bad?
Well, we can.
We can know that God is good all the time even when the sufferings of this world escape our understanding.
Even when the loss of a Christian brother leaves us shaking our heads in bewilderment.
We can say at the same time: “God is good, all the time” - and - “I don’t understand”.
And it’s okay to do that.
We can say both of those.
We can say those things together.
Because they’re both true.
God is only ever good.
We don’t understand why He works the way He does.
And I want us to see that this morning.
That even when we don’t understand, and we hurt, and things are bad - God is good.
So let’s start at the beginning.
In the beginning, God was good.
He had only ever been good.
And then, He created everything.
And He was still good.
And so was His creation.
The book of Genesis tells us seven times that creation was good.
The light was good, the seas and land were good, all the living creatures were good.
When it wasn’t good that man was alone, God made woman, and then it was very good.
It was the only time in the history of the world that the expression “it’s all good” was actually true.
But we are told about another good - and it’s also the first time we’re told about bad.
We are told of a tree in the Garden of Eden.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
It could just as easily be translated the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.
And when the tree is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it isn’t speaking of knowing good and evil in the purely intellectual sense.
It wasn’t like Adam and Eve couldn’t understand the concept of evil.
They had perfect, unfallen minds.
They got the concept.
This, is talking about knowing evil.
Knowing bad.
Being acquainted with it.
Having a first hand experience with bad.
You see, mankind had experienced good.
Adam and Eve only ever experienced good before the Fall.
And when God said:
He was saying that disobeying Him would result in two things.
First, Adam and Eve would now know evil - they would know bad - because they would have experienced it for themselves.
Second, along with that bad, will come the ultimate bad: death.
Death would enter the world if they sinned against God and ate of the tree.
And we all know what happened.
Adam ate of the fruit of the tree, and sin and death entered the world.
And evil - bad - entered the world.
And the world went from good to bad.
From how God created it, to how we made it.
So in the opening chapters of Genesis, we see two things presented to us very clearly.
First, we look at Who God is, and at everything God made, everything God did, everything God gave to us, and all we see is that God is good.
Second, we look at what mankind did, and we see that sin, death - and all the bad - that wasn’t God.
That was us.
God was still only good.
Now, let me make a very important clarification.
I am not saying that the bad things that happen to us are because of our own sins.
Not at all.
Physical and mental illness are no more the direct result of our own sins than a three year old breaking his arm is a result of his sins.
The point is that since sin has entered the world, the world is broken, and so are we, and so we now break.
Once mankind in Adam sinned, the toothpaste wasn’t going back in the tube, bad was here to stay.
And so even those who worship God, and whose hearts are for Him, and who are obedient and submitted to Him - who are good Christians like Mark Di Quattro - they suffer bad.
They even suffer death.
Just ask Abel when you see him.
And I can look back and I can say “Adam, I don’t understand, dude.
You had everything.
It was all good.
Why would you want the one thing God said you couldn’t have?”
But then I think about it.
And I have to actually give Adam some credit.
Because he ate, immediately realized his sin, and was ashamed.
I don’t think just anyone would have reacted that way.
I know myself.
I’ll speak for me.
If that was pre-conversion Lee, I would have rationalized how eating the fruit wasn’t really sin, probably had more, and would have tried to play it off like nothing happened, even if I had to debate God on the matter.
I would have convinced myself that it was still all good.
But now, knowing Christ, I don’t have to try to convince myself that it’s all good.
Circumstances aren’t always good.
Outcomes aren’t always good.
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