Today we are going to begin a new series aimed at how God's will can be at work in a world with suffering, evil, unanswered prayers, and where can we find God in all of this. Today we are going to concentrate on the aspect of God's relationship to evil and suffering. Specifically how thoughtful people might think about God's involvement in the world, the problem of suffering, and then our response.
How Can God do That?
Last summer during our Vacation Bible School we presented the children with a challenge. We placed a basket up front for each class and as the children arrived they would place whatever spare change they found into their class's basket. The incentive for them was that the class that raised the most money would be given the chance to throw a pie at me on the last night. Well, it worked because we raised over $100 to send to Heifer International. Heifer works to battle the issue of starvation because, are you ready for this, an estimated 30,000 children die a day of malnutrition and starvation related illnesses.
These children do not deserve this, they have done nothing to warrant a punishment like this. And so many people begin asking where is God in all of this. How can God sit back and watch this happen? I think about this a lot, and I know many of you do as well. I try to get a bead on how all of this works and as I watch life happening I think I get how God's involvement intersects with this world and then something bad happens and I ask myself wait, how did that work again? This does not feel like there is a good and loving God out there. So today I want us to spend our time together looking at God's involvement in the world, the problem of suffering, and then our response.
Suffering is Biblical
First, let us begin with a brief word about the Bible. Many people have this idea that the Bible and the Christian faith have this Pollyanna worldview of an idyllic life that everything goes well and everyone is happy and if something does not go well then they say, “See, that does not line up with what is in the Bible”. If that is what you think, then you have not read the Bible. The Bible is cover to cover about persecution, oppression, enslavement, and for 400 years it recounts the people crying out “how long O God...will you forget us forever.”
The longest book in the Bible is Psalms. In it are a 150 psalms with the largest category being labeled complaint psalms. An entire book of the OT is called complaints, or you may know it better as Lamentations. One of the biggest books in the Bible, Job, is also the longest epic poem. It is about a man that has everything taken away and is trying to wrestle with how he will make sense of it all. The prophets are constantly saying something terrible is about to happen or something terrible has already happened.
In the New Testament, the story really is not that much brighter. It is the story of Jesus Christ, who we celebrate as the Savior of the world, and at the end of his life, rather than being celebrated, is executed. Then from the the cross Jesus cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?; My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” quoting one of the complaint Psalms, Psalm 22. Then we read further and discover that of His twelve apostles, one committed suicide, one lived out his life in prison and had boiling oil poured over his body and the rest died as a result of their faith. Does that sound idyllic to you? Does that sound like everything went well and everyone was happy?
But what we do find in the Bible are people, that in the face of terrible suffering, hold onto their faith with white knuckles and say, “I refuse to not believe”. Job says, “though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 15:15). The complaint Psalms cry out “How long O Lord; will you forget me forever. But where else where I go for hope?”. And the dominant message of the Gospels is that God when He walked in human flesh on this planet experienced the same kind, if not worse, suffering than you and I will ever experience; torturing and crucifixion. But it does not end with His crucifixion or His burial in the grave because on the third day Christ rose from the dead. The Gospels are a story of both people that endured suffering in this world, but also trusted in God in the face of that suffering, so that ultimately the suffering did not have the final word. God used that suffering and redeemed it for good. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28, “that all things work together for good to those who love God, that in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good.” Folks, that is the message of the Bible.
The Trap
Now as we turn our attention to how to answer the issue of God's relationship to suffering I want to begin by asking you all a question. How many of you have heard the term, “Folk Theology”? That is the theology, or beliefs, that we have and hold onto that have no basis in Scripture. Beliefs that no one has stopped to ask questions about or critically examine. Because when put under examination we discover that while these beliefs may provide some sort of temporary comfort or may seem to magnify God, in the long run actually diminish God and sometimes turn God into a monster. God has blessed you with a wonderful gift, your intellect. An intellect that we are all expected to use.
One phrase I have heard time and time again, and I am sure you have as well, is “everything happens for a reason”. This is meant to have us believe that there is reason for crummy things that happen to us and we just have to be patient to see the good. Another phrase that gets used with great regularity is, “it must have been the will of God”. Those phrases are intended to bring us comfort but we are really talking about cause and effect and we are saying that God willed this crummy thing to happen in order to bring about some greater objective. Because that might sound OK most of the time we do not critique it or give it too much thought until you read something like this. This was an email a woman wrote to her pastor after a horrific tragedy...
Our baby died this past spring when he was six weeks old. So many Christians that we have encountered since then tells us that this was God's plan. Before this tragic event I guess I thought that was how life worked too. But there is no way the death of an innocent six week old could be a part of the intentional plan of a God of love. And if it is, then I am simply not interested in that God.
These phrases, everything happens for a reason and it must have been the will of God, did not bring her any comfort. In fact they drove her away from the God that would have been able to bring her comfort by offering her a picture of God that kills babies. I do not believe God kills babies. How can we say that a God of hope, peace, mercy, justice, and love can do something like this? But we say there was some higher purpose. Those type of ethics, the ends justify the means, have been rejected by many as unacceptable. The ends do not justify the means. So why would we claim this of God? Look, pick up any newspaper or visit any website about current events and they are full of horrible, tragic, heart breaking stories. I do not believe that God puts evil thoughts in the hearts of people to cause these things or purposefully creates those horrific events to fulfill some better plan. But what God does do in these situations is take the mess and force it to accomplish something good and beautiful. That is the redemptive word of the Gospel. God can and does make good from tragedy but that is different from saying God put evil in the heart of another to make them do it so that good could come about. That is why this folk theology can be so dangerous. We have to be careful because when we say this is part of God's plan or everything happens for a reason we are saying God willed it to happen...God made sure it happened.
Conversely, when you do read this book (the Bible), what you find is a whole bunch of stuff that God did not want to happen that did and God continually coming in to clean up the mess and save us from it. That is the love story that you hear me talk about so much. God loves us so much that God's presence is constant.
God's Role
So now that we know what God does not do, what does God do?
We describe our belief in God through Scripture and the Creeds by saying, “We believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” And Heaven is everything, what we call the universe now. So when all of this came into existence God created it.
God is the source of all life, wrote laws that govern our existence on the planet, physical laws that govern it, gave us a soul, and gave us dominion over the earth. God also gave us everything we would need to have dominion; a conscience, a brain, natural resources, His spirit to nudge us, the prophets, the law – 10 commandments. God even came in the flesh as the definitive Word to show us by word and deed what it means to be authentically Christian, to love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. We were all created to be a blessing to other people. To show mercy and grace through our thoughts and actions. All of this was given to us to help us rule and govern over this planet.
If that is not enough we were also sent the Holy Spirit as the Advocate to show us how to be the church so that all of us could surround each other in love and care. God created everything. Every atom is held together by the presence and power of God and we are told in Acts 17, “in him we live and move and have our being.”
But God gave us one more thing, freedom. Freedom to make choices and decisions. Good and bad.
Three areas of suffering
Now that we understand what God does do let us look at a few of the major areas of suffering that we as humanity deal with.
Natural disaster and widespread human suffering
Many of you know about the devastation in Haiti when that earthquake left 200,000 dead and millions living in tents. How do we make sense of a God who sends all of this?
Well let us look at the scientific explanation of a earthquake. Is it God sends a disaster such as this because He is angry and we need to be punished? 2000 years we might have believed this. But now, through science, we have learned about plate tectonics and how they shift due to heat to relieve pressure and how at points they move into each other and create mountains and new land masses. You know those places where some of us find peace, beauty, and splendor and we feel God's presence in those places. All of this is done to help sustain life. However, the energy created from those plates colliding eventually has to be released and there is an earthquake. Unfortunately, humanity gets caught in the places where that release happens. Now is that a device God uses to punish humanity or is it the result of the system needed to help sustain life on this planet? Do we get angry at God for this or do we understand that these are natural occurrences caused by the environmental system needed for us to live?
Well what about malnutrition and the 30,000 children that die everyday because of it? Do we have enough food on this planet to feed its 6.2 billion inhabitants? The answer is yes. The problem is not quantity or capacity, but distribution. And who is responsible for distribution? We are...humanity is.
In Africa, there is a village that has one collective wish, clean drinking water. Water is the essence of life and without clean water people get sick and die. In this village all the clean drinking water they could ever need is 100 ft below them, pure and cleaned by the rocks in the aquifer. But it costs $8000 for a well. They simply do not have the tools to reach it much less the $8000 to drill the boar hole for it.
So I ask you rather than shaking our fists that God is allowing all this happen, who has dominion here? God...or us? God calls us to go and help when these things happen. When those natural disasters happen, as a result of the systems needed to sustain and give us life, God calls us to be His hands, His voice, His love. And when we help those that don't have, you are not only doing God's work but you are transformed. You find joy, meaning, and passion. While they receive something from us, we are finding things for ourselves. This is God's design for us.
Suffering caused by human decisions
Another area of suffering is suffering caused by human decisions. Earlier I said we all have freedom to make decisions, good and bad. That power to make decisions can and does bring pain into our life and we have to understand that we can either have this freedom or God can control everything and regulate us to puppets. But please understand that just as we can make decisions to hurt ourselves, others can make decisions that hurt us and vice versa.
Now look at how this process when carried out by whole societies and groups can cause horrible things to happen. Think of the Holocaust. Who is responsible when those things happen? God? Or is it us, humanity? So I wonder how often does God weep when God sees what we do with this freedom. I can only imagine how I am going to feel the first time Parker or Wesley leave the house alone. When they go somewhere where I will not be and that sense of control and protection that I have now is gone. The people that I talk with that share with me tales of how that freedom allowed them to fall into despair and how they made bad choices that led to unimaginable tragedy, my heart breaks. I can only imagine the sorrow and anguish God our Creator feels. However, God is there. God tries to teach us the way to be and act and when we pull away and do differently, God does not abandon us. When things go bad God pulls us out the pit and saves us and redeems us from the mess that we make. God does not cause those tragedies made from our decisions and the decisions of others, so why do we blame God for the result?
Suffering caused by sickness
A final area I want to cover is suffering caused by sickness. Many of you know about the cholera epidemic going on in Haiti. A pastor down there writes of an encounter he has with a man whose daughter just died from the disease. The pastor writes that as they are talking and he is helping this man to deal with the death of his daughter, at the end of the conversation the man says her death must have been the will of God. The pastor asks the grieving father, “what would you say if I told you a man snuck into your daughter's room one night with a cloth bathed in the cholera germ and placed it over her mouth so she would breath it in and become infected.” The father said that he would think of that man as a monster. That he should be thrown in jail and executed. The pastor then asked the father is that not what you just said God did by declaring your daughter's death God's will?
When situations arise like death from cholera or children who by genetic makeup or because of bacterial influence are born with a birth abnormality that threatens their life or quality of life do we view God as the one that entered the womb and caused these things to be? Science has helped us to understand that these things happen as a result of living, of combining our DNA with each other, not because of God. But in these situations what we do not find is a God that creates these situations for His children, but rather a God that walks with His children through these situations, through these heart breaks, through the valley of the shadow of death. A God that promises us that death will not win that Jesus has guaranteed us life after death.
But in the midst of the pain we have feelings of anger and betrayal that we have to deal with. A man after two years of watching his wife die from cancer talks about how he would go to the cemetery and yell at God. Did you know that yelling at God is an act of faith? You have to believe in God to yell at God, right? God is big enough to handle our yelling and crying out. The Psalmists did it all the time, “how long O God...will you forget us forever.”
God is Here!
Now I do not presume to stand here and have you think that at 37 years old I know all there is about suffering. This message is the result of consulting with people that have much more wisdom and experience than I do. This message is the compilation of my speaking with them, reading about them, listening to them. I do this because I want you to know something. When we face these situations, and all of us will at some point, I encourage you to turn to God. God will take over the suffering and joy will eventually return. We have opportunity after opportunity to turn from God..injustice, unfairness. But when we do that the injustice and unfairness are still there. The only thing missing is the One that will help you through it. The One that will restore your hope. So my challenge to you is to turn to God in all things. God is here!
Prayer:
God help me to believe.
Help me to trust you.
When I see suffering in others help me to respond as your hands and voice.
God take the painful things in my life and bring something good from them.
Lord I offer my life to you.
Help me believe...help me to trust.
In Jesus Name...Amen
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