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May 31, 2015

How could a loving God let all these bad things happen

Passage: Romans 8:18-39

Preacher: John Huizinga

Series: Why It's Hard for me to Believe?

Detail:

What are the biggest obstacles to faith
that you have faced?
That’s the question I asked you the past few weeks and you responded with some of the issues,
either personal
or that you have tried to answer while witnessing
to friends about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We’ll shine the light of the Bible and the leading of the Holy Spirit on these questions
throughout the summer
in order to help us both in our faith
and in our witnessing.

The first obstacle to belief is the problem of evil:
why do bad things happen if God is so good
and the Triune God is almighty?
In our Romans 8 passage Paul brings up
the question of ‘our present sufferings.’

As I have begun to work through these questions
I want to say a few things that the Spirit
has made plain to me so far:
First, the deep questions and struggles of faith
are difficult and hard to understand and answer
because these bring us up close to
the mysteries of God’s sovereignty and will.
If we expect that we with our finite minds
and experiences and fickle hearts
can figure out everything there is to figure out
about God we will be disappointed.
Sometimes this is the best thing
you can point out to those who struggle.
Christians don’t have the answers
to all these mysteries,
BUT neither does anyone else.
Most of the important things in life
will come down to who you trust,
not how much you know.
So second, our best witness and our best response
in these mysteries is in relationship.
I think we get afraid to witness
because we don’t think our faith is all that strong
or informed.
We have our own doubts and struggles.
The best way to face these is
in our faith relationship to the Lord:
praying, faithfulness, worshiping, fellowship –
that is, get as close to God as you can,
and wait for the Spirit to counsel and comfort you.

In fact, that’s the answer Romans gives us here
to the first faith obstacle:
respond to the mystery of suffering with hope.
When we suffer let us commit to
getting as close as we can to the Lord in prayer,
in Bible study and fellowship in the church,
sharing together our hurts.
When others suffer,
commit to being there for them,
so they don’t suffer alone,
get as close as you can in prayer and care,
sharing our stories together.

So here’s our best antidote
when we get afraid to witness.
Sooner or later
someone will ask us a question that we can’t answer. Instead of trying to answer all the objections
that might arise,
look for ways to tell your story.
How you hope in God,
how you can help others in pain
to hope in God.

That to me is the best answer to this first objection
or obstacle to faith:
the problem of evil.
If God is so good, why is the world so full of pain, sorrow, and injustice?
If God is so good why is there so much suffering?
The question is asked in many ways
by almost everybody at one time or another
in the blood, sweat and tears of life.

The example I will use is that of Peter DeVries,
the late author.
Because he was one of us,
growing up in the CRC on the south side
about 100 years ago.
It appears that he lost his faith
through the suffering in his family, most famously, the loss of his daughter Emily, to leukemia,
which led to his novel, The Blood of the Lamb,
in which the main character also loses his daughter
to leukemia,
and loses his faith along the way.
Listen to him describe the fictional death of the girl,
and you can overhear his own pain:
She went her way in the middle of the afternoon, borne from the dull watchers on a wave that broke and crashed beyond our sight. In that fathomless and timeless silence one does look rather wildly about for a clock, in a last attempt to fix the lost spirit in time.
I had guessed what the hands would say. Three o’clock. The children were putting their schoolbooks away, and getting ready to go home.

Other children were leaving school,
like kids are supposed to do at that age,
not leave life, like his daughter did.
You can hear the cry of injustice,
the grief and anger all mixed together
and directed at the heavens.

So Don Wanderhope, the girl’s father in the novel, says, “How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit.”
He had bought a cake for his daughter
to cheer her up.
He never got a chance to give it to her.
Leaving the hospital with the cake in hand,
he walks by a crucifix on the hospital grounds.
He stops, he removes the cake from its box,
balances it on his palm, and lets it fly —
smack into the face of a stone Jesus.
de Vries writes:
“Then through scalded eyes I seemed to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away.”

In 1959, De Vries wrote to JD Salinger,
“One trip through a children’s hospital ward and if your faith isn’t shaken, you’re not the type who deserves any faith.”

So what do we say in our suffering
and in the face of great evil?
That’s what Paul is writing about in Romans 8.
He knew about evil:
both the evil within and the evil without.
In chapter 7 Paul confesses his own wretchedness: The evil I don’t want to do I find myself doing; the good that I want to do I don’t do. What’s wrong with me? What a wretched man I am!
The evil inside.
He knew too the evil outside:
the injustice of others
just as he had been unjust to others:
2 Corinthians 11:24-26
24 Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers.

What do we say about the problem of evil?
What’s the answer?
The answer the Bible gives us is both
not enough and more than enough:
it’s not enough because
God never gives us the complete answer why:
Job is never told why he lost everything.
To the disciples’ questions to Jesus his answers are: don’t try to figure out if someone is to blame
or if anyone deserves it,
or anything like that;
this is leading to the glory of God,
and evil happens because God has his enemies.
In Revelation the martyrs under the throne cry,
‘How long?’
And the answer given in Rev 6:11 is this:
Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer . . .
for there is more suffering yet to come.
Here in Romans 8
we don’t read answers
to our questions why or how come,
but antidotes to our present suffering:
they don’t compare to the glory being revealed,
to the hope and the salvation.

So it’s clear to me that we cannot know fully
the answer to our questions about evil and suffering.
And if that bothers you or makes you angry,
let me remind you that the answers others give
don’t help at all:
the materialist may say it’s not evil at all,
just all part of the natural order
and that the fittest survive.
But that doesn’t help me now deal with my pain.
Other religions may say it’s just karma
and you get what you deserve,
but that’s not true because
many DON’T get what they deserve,
and some don’t deserve what they get at all.

The answer the Bible gives is not an answer why
as much as it is what God is doing about it.
It’s not about knowing why there is evil and suffering but how one can get through it
to restoration and triumph.
Because that’s what matters.
The Bible may not give us the full answer to evil,
but it gives a resounding answer
that God has overcome evil with good.

And this is where our stories come in.
Because it seems to me the greatest answer to evil,
and the greatest witness to our questions why,
come in the form of Christian hope.

Romans’ answer is not some logical rational reasoning that proves God and answers the problem of evil: Romans’ answer is hope.
Hope found in a person,
in Christ who suffered,
whose love cannot be taken from those who suffer.
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

An example of this comes from the late
Dr Lew Smedes,
who was also CRC,
and who also lost a child.
But his story is different from Peter de Vries’ story. Listen:
Doris and I cried a lot and we knew in our tears that God was with us, paying attention to us, shedding ten thousand tears for every one of ours. . . he never seemed more real to either of us, Never closer. Never more important. I could stop believing that he had micromanaged our tiny boys’ dying. But I could not stop trusting that God was still with us.
I have given up asking why such bad things happen. Instead I look to the future and ask when. When is God doing to come and purge evil from his world?
Hope.
It’s not for nothing that Peter DeVries’ character is named Wanderhope.
He needs what Lew Smedes talks about.

The good news is over and over people testify
that the Lord is present with us in suffering,
his power and promises while we hurt,
and not even this evil you are going thru
separates you form his love.

So as you face these struggles,
your own, or with another,
see if you can move toward the greater question:
but how does God triumph and get me through?
It is the question of hope.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for . . . Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Heb 11:1)

What is hope?
Biblical hope is: ‘a good confidence
in God’s faithfulness
that nothing will separate us from his love.’

John Piper says it this way: There is a moral certainty that the good we expect and desire will be done. I call it moral because it is rooted in the commitment of the will of persons.

He means that hope causes you and me to act
a certain way in a complete trust in God.
So hope is not wishing but acting
in trust of a certain relationship with God
and based on who God is in Christ.

Hope leads us to the antidote to our suffering:
not an answer –
but a way thru to wholeness again,
salvation, a freedom to love and live life,
loving this world as God so loved the world –
Hope gives us the freedom to face suffering
in the power of the cross and the empty tomb:
- in hope evil can be named for what it is
- in hope we are empowered to grieve
- in hope we affirm God’s sovereignty
- in hope we act to overcome evil with good
This is all god and helpful.
But there is a deeper question still
when it comes to evil:
the greatest challenge to God
regarding the problem of evil
is given voice in Dostoevsky’s novel
The Brothers Karamazov.
One brother, Ivan,
will not believe in God
because of the evil of human beings,
especially on children.
He doesn’t doubt God could bring salvation,
bring justice someday,
bring good out of evil.
He says none of that is worth such suffering.
He challenges his believing brother Alyosha with this.
Not just why is there suffering?
But why would God order creation this way?

What can he say?
Alyosha’s response is to embrace his brother
with a brotherly kiss.
The Christian man Dostoevsky is teaching us
that the answer to evil and suffering
is not somehow figuring out the mystery
of it all,
but hope that shows in our will to act deliberately,
in the love of Christ.
Alyosha’s mentor and pastor says to him:
Kiss the earth and love it, love it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything . . . Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Don’t be ashamed of that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God, and a great one.

How can we hope so?
Romans 8 teaches
that because of Christ’s cross evil has been named
and defeated,
overcome with good.
The hope,
the certainty is that God
works in all things for our good.
Not all things are God’s things.
The Bible is clear that God does not cause evil.
God does not even tempt, says James.
But God has his enemies.
And sin has broken this world.
But IN all things God works.

And not all things are good things.
We know this by experience.
But God works in all things
for the good of those who love him.
And what is that good?
It is the fulfillment and persevering of us
in our salvation.

Psalm 71 encourages us to hope again:
5 For you have been my hope, O Sovereign Lord,
my confidence since my youth.
14 But as for me, I will always have hope;
I will praise you more and more.
Hope is what Christians do.
Peter wrote to the believers in Asia Minor
that they should
"always be prepared to give an answer
to anyone who asks them
to give a reason for the hope
that is in them" (1 Peter 3:15).
Christians ought to be known as hopeful people.
If an unbeliever watches you for a while
and then asks about something,
at least part of what she asks about
should be your hope.
Our hope should show.

Does it matter?
I just read Dr Holly Ordway’s story this week - Ordway was an atheist
who took pride in being an atheist.
She had carefully built up a defense.
But she was surprised by such writers as
John Keats, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, men who wrote of a beautiful concept: hope.
GM Hopkins, in his Carrion comfort says –
Despair is a carrion comfort,
it is like eating roadkill, he says,
I’ll not feast on that and say I can’t do anything
I can, I can do something,
I can hope.

A day of hope . . . was there such a day to hope for?
Dr Ordway found that in Jesus.

The Christian answer to suffering and evil is the cross. God created the world good,
evil is the result of sin,
breaking all of the cosmos.
So God suffered the cross to say
God is with us in suffering,
God meets us in the crosses we bear,
nothing separates us from his love,
and our response is be trust,
compassion,
justice and other hopeful actions.

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Not no death,
not a stopping of the powers of evil,
not the deepest darkness, nor demons,
but none of these have final say –
only God’s love in Christ.

Those who struggle with this
will have a hard time being weaned away
from a satisfying answer
toward a resurrection of hope.
I know we want answers.
But more,
what we really want is
the power of deliverance,
the ability to overcome.
Salvation.
So we do better to show it than to tell it.
But still,
there is something of eternity
in the heart of every person,
a God-shaped hole in one’s heart
that only Christ can fill,
that each wants filled
even if he or she won’t admit it.

I find an example of that longing
in the scientific objection to God
known as Darwin’s wasp.
It’s real name is the ichneumon wasp
(so you see why it’s called Darwin’s wasp –
it’s easier to say).
But more so,
because it seems to point to the cruelty of nature
and judge no loving God would create such a thing.
To feed its larvae,
the ichneumon wasp paralyzes a caterpillar
and then lays eggs on it
so that the wasp’s larvae
can slowly eat the caterpillar
while the caterpillar is still alive.
The larvae begin with the caterpillar’s
non-essential organs,
saving its vital organs for last,
so that the victim will stay alive as long as possible.
The judgment is a Good Creator
would never create such a monstrous way of life.

But here’s the question:
why would Darwinists think this cruel?
Why does a materialist find this behavior troubling?
What is built inside us
that we would see this as harsh?
The answer is that human beings sense
that suffering is wrong
and there is evil in the world.
The fact that we are troubled by suffering
and judge certain things evil
is something we must address.
And we must address it with more than answers why.
We must find hope.
And then act hopefully.

So that’s where we would witness.
If the Christian answer to suffering is not satisfying, what other answer is there?
And that would be the question we can ask of those who say evil proves there is no God.
Where then is your hope?

Then may we show the way to the one who shouldered evil and who suffered for us
rising again in triumph over evil.
Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God. – Ps 42

So if you struggle with the question of evil
or if a friend can’t get past this objection to belief,
look at your hope,
show your hope,
ask about where one’s hope lives.
For over and over God meets us
on the broken roads,
carrying crosses,
in the dark,
providing the way to new life.