Psalm 73:1-3
1 – Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
2 – But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold.
3 – For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Psalm 73:13-14
13 – Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.
14 – All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning.
Psalm 73 : 16-17
16 – When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me
17 – till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.
Psalm 73 : 21-26
21 – When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered,
22 – I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before You.
23 – Yet I am always with You; You hold me by my right hand.
24 – You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will take me into glory.
25 – Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides You.
26 – My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
You may remember that last Sunday I quoted Charles Templeton, evangelist turned atheist, who questioned the existence of Hell. Well this morning I’d like to begin by giving you a little more insight into Templeton’s life by telling you about the event that led him to abandon his belief in God. To do that we need to go back to the early years of the ministry of Billy Graham because at this time Templeton and Graham were close friends. Templeton claimed to have had a powerful conversion experience at the age of 18 and the two worked together in the burgeoning Youth for Christ movement. In those days Graham and Templeton were both popular preachers…leading evangelistic crusades all over Europe. Many even went so far as to predict that Templeton would one day eclipse Graham in the pulpit. He was that good.
Then in the late 1940’s Templeton began to doubt his faith. He criticized Graham for believing in the authority of the Bible telling him that, in his opinion, that way of thinking was behind the times. And then, the straw that broke the back of Templeton’s faith was a picture that appeared in LIFE magazine. He described the experience in this way:
It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa. They were experiencing a devastating drought and she was holding her dead baby in her arms…and looking up into heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?’ How could a loving God do this to that woman? Who runs the rain? I don’t. HE does-or that’s what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony…when all that was needed was rain?
Like the Psalmist who penned the words of our text for this morning, trying to understand the suffering of the world, …was oppressive… to Templeton. He decided that his faith had been …in vain. So, from this point on Templeton abandoned his belief in God. He left the ministry and spent the rest of his life involved in politics and in writing books. His latest is entitled: Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. Our own Naomi Linn, who was also involved in the early days of the Youth For Christ movement, knew Templeton. Naomi told me recently that he died a few weeks ago, as a result of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. His funeral was held in a country club.
Now, these days many people can identify with Templeton’s perspective on suffering.
They watch the television news reports that tell of thousands dying in earthquakes or hurricanes and they wonder, Where is God? They read that 30,000 children around the world starve to death each day and they think, Why doesn’t God feed these kids? Many people steer clear of the Christian faith because they reason that the loving, all-powerful God of the Bible simply cannot exist…for if He did all this suffering would not take place. In his book, The Case for Faith, Strobel reports that this issue keeps seekers from embracing a faith in Christ more than anything else.
And even Christians struggle with this one, especially when we see that so many times it is the innocent who seem to suffer the most. Sheldon Vanauken-who took the reverse route in life as did Templeton-He was once an agnostic but became a devout believer. Vanauken writes,
If only villains got broken backs or cancers, if only cheaters and crooks got Parkinson’s disease, we should see a sort of celestial justice in the universe. But as it is a sweet-tempered child lies dying of a brain tumor, a happy young wife sees her husband and child killed before her eyes by a drunken driver…and we soundlessly scream at the stars: ‘Why? Why?’
There are times when all of us wonder why our loving God allows suffering. Like the Psalmist our feet almost slip when we see the prosperity of the wicked. Well, what about it? Was Templeton right? Does the presence of evil and suffering disprove the existence of the loving God of the Bible?
Now, I’ve decided I won’t make you sit through an entire sermon to wait for the answer. Unlike last week I’ll get to the reply to today’s question right off. It is, No! The suffering that is so prevalent in our world does NOT prove that atheists are right. In fact, I believe the reality of evil and suffering is very clear evidence that our loving God DOES exist. In a recent issue of MOODY magazine Ravi Zacharias said, One cannot disprove the existence of God by introducing the reality of evil. Evil exists only if an absolute moral law exits…but an objective moral law exists only if God does. [So] to raise the question to disprove God is self-defeating. Do you understand this rationale? Zacharias and others say that our judgement that it is BAD for children to starve and for people to die in earthquakes pre-supposes that there is a GOOD…a STANDARD that determines what is evil and what is good.
Strobel points out that it’s like giving a student an 85 on a test. Doing so presumes that 100 is the standard on which that grade is based. In other words, a test grade that is less than perfect infers that there is such a thing as a perfect score. And a world that is less than perfect assumes that perfection does exist. C. S. Lewis wrote, If the universe is so bad…how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? The very presence of these ideas in our minds…that is, the idea of evil, thus of goodness and of God as the origin and standard of goodness-needs to be accounted for.
So, the existence of evil and suffering actually goes a long way toward proving that God is good and that He does exist. But that only answers part of our question because if God does exist and if He is the all-powerful and loving God described in the Bible, then why does He allow so much suffering in the world?
Well, I don’t want to presume to have a complete answer to all this. It is impossible for us to understand all that God does or does not do. As He told us in Isaiah 55, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Since God is infinitely superior to us in every possible way, there are some things we will only understand, by and by. From our perspective we can’t possibly understand all there is to know about the painful struggles we all go through in life but today I do want to point our three reasons that I believe there is suffering in our world and the first is this.
1. Suffering exists-indirectly- because of the NATURE of God.
Now, that sounds like a contradiction. I mean How could God allow suffering to take place? Well, listen closely and let me explain. The Bible tells us that the nature of God is love. It is His essence. As I John 4:16 says, God IS love. And because of this aspect of His nature, God values love above all things…which is why He created us to exist in a love relationship with Him.
But this kind of relationship would only be possible if we were made in such a way that we were capable of loving God of our own free will. As Yancey says in his book, Disappointment With God, our Creator, desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love… of an adult. So, as Douglas John says, God’s problem is not that He is un-ABLE to do certain things… like stopping all suffering. He could certainly do that.
No, God’s problem is that He loves. And love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life. You see, a world without free will and the evil that people choose because of it would also be a world without love. Sure, there would have been no hate…no suffering…but neither would there have been love…which is the highest value in God’s universe. A world without human freedom by definition would have been a world without humans.
So, the source of evil and suffering is not God’s unwillingness to use His power. It is mankind’s abuse of it’s God-given freedom. Peter Kreeft writes, Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin. And this leads to the second reason there is suffering in the world…
2. …the nature of MAN.
You see, the Bible affirms the fact that all of us use our God-given freedom to do evil. As the prophet Isaiah said, All we, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way. And as Paul wrote in Romans 3:23 All [mankind] has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Well, when we go astray, when we use our freedom to sin, we face painful consequences. Since we live in a moral universe a person cannot continually go against the grain without getting splinters along the way. I’m saying that many times the suffering we endure in life is because of our own disobedience of God’s loving commands. When an individual has sex outside of marriage and gets a sexually transmitted disease they suffer…but it’s not God’s fault. They have no one to blame but themselves because they chose to ignore God’s moral law. In the same way that there are painful consequences to breaking the law of gravity there are painful consequences to breaking God’s law.
And unfortunately, our sinful choices not only hurt us. They often hurt others as well. When those fanatics chose to fly the planes into the World Trade Center, their choice hurt countless thousands of others and drove two nations to war. The horrors of September 11 happened because of the sinful choices of people.
3. And then…a third reason there is suffering is because of the nature of the WORLD.
Romans 8:20-22 says that because of the sin of Adam and Eve all, …creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice…but by its bondage to decay. In other words some of the suffering in the world is due to the fact that when sin entered the world, a terrible thing took place. Not only did sin touch the creatures but also the creation and because it did, we have diseases like anthrax and floods and earthquakes and droughts and tornados. Insurance companies refer to these natural disasters as, acts of God but that is not really true. These calamities are the end result of the actions of man at the dawn of time. Sin has tainted our world just as it has tainted our lives and because it has, this is a dangerous, fallen world in which to live.
In his book Disappointment With God Philip Yancey interviews a man named Douglas who had endured a great deal of suffering. His wife had recurring breast cancer. He had been in an automobile accident that had taken most of his vision. But when asked how he felt about all this he said, We tend to think that life should be fair because God is fair. But God is not life and if I confuse God with the physical reality of life by expecting constant good health, for example then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment. Douglas learned that God is fair…but life in a fallen world is not.
In the first few verses of the thirteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus was asked about some Galileans who were apparently murdered while they were innocently worshiping in the temple and about eighteen people who were killed when a tower in the village of Siloam fell on them. In His response our Lord inferred that these disasters happened not because of the sin of those who were killed but simply because bad things happen in a fallen world. Thanks to the sin of Adam and Eve this is not a safe place in which to live and we should not be surprised to hear this because Jesus told us this repeatedly. In Matthew 24 He said, You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen…Nations will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places… (Matthew 24:6-8 ) In John 16:33 Jesus said, In this world you WILL have trouble! As Christians we must let texts like this remind us that it is hazardous to your health to live in this world but must also remember that this world of ours is a TEMPORARY world. The real world…the permanent world…the fair world…the world where there is no suffering or death….is yet to come. As II Peter 3:13 says, In keeping with [Jesus’] promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. Mother Theresa-someone who was very familiar with suffering all her life once said, In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.
So, suffering happens indirectly because of the nature of God and also because of the nature of man and the nature of our fallen world. But one other very important thing that I think we should note in all this is that…
4. …one reason God allows suffering is because He knows that it can actually be GOOD for us.
This realization is what led James to write, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4 ) This is why Paul wrote in Romans 5, We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, and character hope. Now, How exactly does suffering benefit us?
1. Well for one thing, it drives us to our best EFFORTS.
You see, most of the time in life we are inclined to take things for granted…to take it easy and to be very satisfied with ourselves. For many of us AVERAGE is a satisfactory standard of achievement in life. But when tough time’s come, we are roused from our complacency and put forth our best efforts. So, Bad times can be the catalyst in our lives that enable us to both attempt and achieve things we would never have done in good times.
I have read of men stranded in the desert with no water walking vast distances, impossible distances, to civilization and survival. Psychologists call this: “A long series of phyletic modifications of the phronema of the cortex.” Don’t ask me if I spelled that correctly! But, what all this medical terminology means is that when things like this happen-when bad times come-we have this urge from our brain to do our best. We are aroused to greater energy and we accomplish astounding, even impossible things.
The principle we can learn here is that tough times make tougher people. Our response to bad things can make us better….stronger…wiser people! We can grow from these bumps in the road of life and learn to go father and higher than we did before they came our way…when the road was smooth and easy.
I read once that when they first invented golf balls, they made the covers smooth…I guess the original golf balls looked sort of like a ping pong ball. Then it was discovered that after a ball had been roughed up — knocked around the course a couple of times — a golfer could get more distance out of it. So they started manufacturing them with dimpled covers….like we see today. It is the same way in life. Often it takes the rough spots of life to make you go your farthest.
And, history is filled with examples of the positive effects of bad things on good people: Cripple a man and he becomes Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in prison and he becomes John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge and you get George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty and the result is Abraham Lincoln. Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again and you have Glenn Cunningham, who set a world’s record in 1934 for running the mile in 4 minutes, 6.7 seconds. Deafen a genius composer and you have a Ludwig Van Beethoven. Call him a slow learner, and write him off as someone who cannot be taught, and you have an Albert Einstein.
Good, amazing good, can come from bad when we allow bad things to spur us on to doing our very best. We need to understand that God is the potter and our lives are His clay and often He uses our bad experiences to break us and remold us into better vessels…capable of doing greater things. Moral character is formed through hardship…through overcoming obstacles, through enduring despite difficulties. If we are mature enough we can LEARN from the times of suffering that come our way.
2. Another benefit of suffering is that it drives us to our KNEES.
You see, often the only thing that brings people to their knees in prayer is crisis. Pushed to the brink, back to the wall, right up to the wire, all escape routes closed…only then do people go to God for His help….only then do they seek a personal, intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father. I heard this week that the American Bible Society reports that since the suffering on September 11, sales of Bibles are up 40%….People are reaching out to God like never before.
A few years ago I read the story of Brian Wolfe in an issue of GUIDEPOST magazine. One day, on a whim, Brian decided to take his 2-year-old daughter for a ride in the forests of the beautiful pacific northwest. He drove 14 miles from their home where he turned off the main highway and followed dirt and gravel roads until he was forced to shift into 4-wheel drive so that he could reach a very remote spot deep in the woods where he knew there was a beaver pond. Bryan thought his little girl would enjoy seeing the beaver paddling around in the water. Well, they enjoyed a walk together and although they saw no beaver, the little girl loved splashing her hand in the water and calling for them. Then, before heading for home Bryan led his little girl back to the truck and put her in her car seat so he could safely use his rifle for a little target practice. He spotted an old tree stump that was about six-feet high and placed a couple of cans on it, walked back to the truck and after careful aim, easily picked off both targets. The cans had fallen inside the hollow stump and Bryan wanted to see where his bullets had made contact so he left his rifle on the hood of the truck and walked over to the stump to retrieve the cans. He hoisted himself up halfway on the stump and leaned down inside to try and retrieve his targets when suddenly a few inches of the rotted wood crumbled underneath him causing his center of gravity to shift so that he fell, head-first into the stump, one arm pinned to his side and the other wrapped around his head. He was wedged in that hollow tree stump like a cork in a bottle. All that showed from the outside were his boots….upside down of course. At first he was amused by this freak accident but very quickly claustrophobia led him to panic. As he struggled in vain to free himself he heard his little girl talking nearby…and he realized that she had somehow gotten out of her car seat and was toddling around in the woods. His panic increased as he thought of his loaded rifle laying on the hood …of the deep pond…of wild animals….of her getting lost before he could free himself. He tried to yell to his little girl to stay in the truck but his voice was muffled by the thick tree trunk. As his panic built he felt ants and insects crawling all over his body. Hours passed. His head began to swell. Nausea emptied his stomach. Bryan admitted that he had not been on speaking terms with God for a long time, that he had felt he didn’t really need God in his life, that he could take care of himself But as six hours passed and he realized he might never be found in this remote area, that his little girl was in serious danger….he began to pray with great fervor and sincerity. Oh God, please take care of my little girl. She is so innocent. Take me instead, a sinner, but save her. …. he sobbed…. Please forgive me for turning my back on You… He continued to pour out his soul to God. At one point he screamed in agony asking God to help him. After he finished his prayer only a few minutes passed before he heard someone calling out to him and a short time later he was rescued by two loggers who said they had felt led to explore the woods where Bryan was trapped. His little girl had fallen asleep in a moss-filled ditch and was perfectly safe. After this incident….because of it….Bryan embraced a personal faith in God. He said, It took being stuck upside down in that tree stump — helpless — to get me to admit I couldn’t get everything out of life on my own….that I needed God. Now I thank God for it all: my wife, my daughter — and my life.
Brian’s experience shows that one reason that our good God allows bad to come into our lives is to drive us to our knees…to motivate us to return to Him. That reluctant Old Testament prophet, Jonah learned this lesson. Remember? It was from the deep — almost as deep as you can get — that he cried for help, choking on salt water in his distress. King David learned this lesson as well. When he was up to his chin in the quicksand of crisis, he wrote in Psalm 40 that God had …lifted him out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; and set his feet on a rock… Suffering deepened Job’s walk with God as well. Yancey writes, Job’s suffering hollowed out a big space in him so that God and joy could fill it. So, bad times are actually precious if our temporary pain leads to the eternal gain that comes from walking closer with God. Psalm 119:67,71 says, Before I was afflicted, I went astray…but now I obey Your Word. It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn Your decrees.
I’m not claiming to understand it all but I do believe that one reason our loving God allows us to endure suffering is because amazing good can come from it. And the greatest example of this principle is the Cross. The very worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the world…the greatest amount of suffering ever endured…was when Jesus-God’s only Son-was crucified. At the time His disciples thought their world had ended for good but then Easter Sunday dawned and our Risen Lord helped them to see that because of that infinite amount of BAD, God has made possible an infinite amount of GOOD. The worst tragedy in history brought about the most glorious event in history. Kreeft writes, Just imagine every single pain in the history of the world, all rolled together into a ball, eaten by God, digested, fully tasted, eternally. In the act of creating the world, God not only said, let there be pretty little bunny rabbits and flowers and sunsets, but also let there be blood and guts and the buzzing flies around the cross. Templeton questioned how a loving God could bear all the suffering of the world but that is exactly what He did. Many Christians try to get God off the hook when it comes to suffering but God put Himself on the hook so to speak when He allowed His only Son to be nailed to the tree. So, then next time you endure a time of suffering…the next time your back is against the wall…remember, Jesus’ back was against the cross.
John Donne, the 17th century poet and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was well acquainted with suffering. During his tenure at St. Paul’s three waves of the bubonic plague swept through the city, the last one killing 40,000 people. In his attempts to wrestle with the reason for all this Donne realized that living in a fallen world means that we will often face suffering and He decided that in such a world, he had a choice: fear God or fear the suffering…trust God or trust nothing. He decided that it was best to fear God more than suffering and pain. He decided to put his trust in God. This morning I hope we have learned the importance of doing the same. I know we haven’t faced bubonic plague here at Redland but as your pastor I am well-acquainted with the fact that many of you have suffered….illness…loss of employment…death of loved ones…and I urge you to follow Donne’s example and put your trust…your faith…in God. Learn to say with the Psalmist, My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
If you are here today and are facing the trials and tribulations of life without Christ, then I invite you to put your faith in Him today. Ask Him to forgive you of your sin and to come into your life as Lord. Trust Him with your life. Others of you who are Christians may feel God leading you to trust His leading you to join this church and become a part of our ministry to the hurting people around us. Whatever decision you have to make, I encourage you to do so now as we stand and sing.