How Could A Good God Allow Suffering?

Well, today we kick off a new message series called Pull Up a Chair. So I'm literally going to do that. Our mission is to grow as disciples of Christ. We want to grow together as disciples of Christ. And we want to inspire others to follow Jesus.

And that mission requires us to address questions that sometimes for some of us at least, present some barriers to faith. You know, Wrestling with hard questions is a part of the way that we come to faith. It's a part of the way that we grow in our faith. And it's certainly an important part of sharing our faith. So we want to spend the next several weeks talking together about some of these questions that often pose struggles for people who are trying to figure out is, is this Jesus thing something that I can really sink my teeth into?

Is this something that's really worth my time and my attention? You know, for a lot of people, pain, pain is a significant barrier to faith. Whether we're talking about starvation in Africa or poverty in Haiti or war in Gaza and Ukraine right now, if we're talking about human trafficking or loved ones who are struggling with cancer, or friends who've been injured in car accidents, people suffer in our world every day. And Christians and skeptics alike struggle to make sense of that. I mean, we look at the pain in our world and we wonder, if there is a God, why do innocent children suffer?

Or if God is good, why do people die from contaminated drinking water or from famine caused by something as simple as a lack of rain? Or if God has the power to heal disease, why doesn't he always. Or if God is good and kind, why can't the Colts put together a decent season? Right? I mean, there are lots of things we wonder about and these are really legitimate questions.

I think that if only serial killers got cancer, I mean, if only rapists got murdered, if only terrorists died in plane crashes, we might be able to live with that, don't you think? But any of us who've lived for any amount of time in this world recognize that it doesn't work that way. Pain is equal opportunity. And to engage our world in a meaningful way with the love of Jesus, we need to be willing to talk about these questions. So this series, I'll just tell you up front, we're not going to be able to answer every question we would ever grapple with in a way that's going to give us complete peace of mind about it.

But I do pray that in the time we spend together these next few weeks, we will be better equipped to have kind and thoughtful and respectful faith building conversations about spiritual things. And so the question we want to unpack today is this. How could a good God allow suffering? This is a surprisingly common question and it, it hinges on a number of different thought processes. But some of those thought processes, I believe, are assumptions.

And I think it's helpful for us to unpack some of these assumptions so that we can better think and talk about this question. For example, one assumption that underlies this question is this, that the presence of pain means the absence of God, that if there is pain in our world, it must be because there is no God. Pain challenges our conceptions about good and evil. I mean, the reality is we call suffering unjust because we have an ideal of the way that things should be. And that ultimate good, whether we call it by this name or not, is actually God.

The book of Genesis tells us that you and I, all of humanity, we're created in the image of God, and his divine thumbprint on each of us is where our capacity to think about morality even comes from. CS Lewis is a famous writer, thinker, theologian, who, before he embraced faith, was actually a strong skeptic. And in his spiritual searching, he came to this realization. CS Lewis said, my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?

There are plenty of people who believe that there is no God and that everything we experience is the result of random evolutionary chance. But if that's true, then isn't the violence and the pain and the death that goes along with natural selection exactly what we ought to expect? Lee Strobel says it like this. If there is no God, where did we get the standard of goodness by which we judge evil as evil? I mean, if there is no creator God, then everything that is has either always existed or it has evolved to its present state.

And if the universe has no original cause, if the universe has been gradually and accidentally evolving toward order and perfection for billions of years, then by now I would think that things should be closer to perfection than ever before. But that's not what we see, is it? So for that reason, I understand that sometimes people are drawn to atheism because they struggle so much to reconcile pain with the existence of God. But atheism really doesn't provide much help when it comes to questions about pain. If there is no God whose image within us makes us consciously desire something better, then the reality of pain, the way we experience it, should not be as troubling to us as.

As it is. So I'm convinced that our philosophical struggle with pain may actually be stronger evidence for God's existence than against it. Here's a second assumption that I think plays into this question. That is, if God is real, he must answer all of our questions. See, if the world that we live in were, without any exception, horrible and evil, I think it would be more natural for us to completely disbelieve in God.

But what's confusing to us is that our world contains both good and evil. They sit side by side, day after day after day. Augustine, who is a 4th century theologian and philosopher, put it like this. Augustine asked, if there is no God, why is there so much good? If there is a God, why is there so much evil?

The bottom line is that suffering is hard. And we don't want in any way with this message or any part of this series to suggest otherwise. When we hurt, that isn't fun. We tend to wonder where God is when life gets painful. By nature, faith entails a certain amount of wondering.

God doesn't remove all mystery. He actually very incrementally, very gradually reveals himself to those who seek him. If we had no questions, if everything about God were made completely plain to us, then we wouldn't have to trust. We wouldn't need faith. We could just see.

That's why Jesus said, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives. The one who seeks, finds.

And to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Coming to a place of faith is always going to require that we do some seeking and some searching and some questioning. Now, there are other assumptions that play into this question of God's goodness and the existence of evil. And here's another one. It's the assumption that God cannot be all good and all powerful and all knowing at the same time.

I've. I have a friend, one of my ones, who has made this suggestion to me, said, you can have two of the three, but you can't have all of them. So let's break this down for a second. We sometimes believe that if God is truly good, he'll only allow good things to happen. So when things happen that feel bad to us, we assume it's because A God isn't smart enough to foresee those things, or B God isn't powerful enough to stop those things, or C, God isn't loving enough to care that those things happen.

But are those conclusions logical? Is that fair? So let's unpack a few additional questions that I think play into this assumption that, that plays into this big question that we're asking. This is a really important question. Number one, is God all good?

That's one of the things that we philosophically grapple with. Imagine for a second that life were only pleasure, constant fun, no homework, no consequences, no sickness, no pain, no death. Do you suppose in a world like that we might all very quickly become spoiled brats. You ever been around kids whose parents never tell them no? They're not usually pleasant kids to be around.

See, rather than keeping us from ever getting hurt, God's goodness sometimes means not rescuing us. So let me explain what I mean by that. When our oldest son, Colin, was first learning to ride his bike. Full disclosure, this is not an actual picture of Colin and me. Okay.

This is just a stock photo. But when Colin was first learning to ride his bike, I took him to a park near our house where I knew the grass would give him a softer landing when he fell. Now, Colin got the balance thing down pretty quickly, but steering took a little bit longer. Initially, Colin was really good at riding straight. Like, straight into whatever was in front of him.

So a picnic table or barbecue grill. Colin collided with several of those, and I didn't enjoy that. I didn't enjoy watching my son bump into things and then fall down. But I also knew that if I went down to the park ahead of time and encased everything in bubble wrap, Colin would have no motivation to learn how to steer his bike and avoid those collisions. And since most of the places where people ride bikes and where Colin would eventually ride his bike are full of unforgiving things like asphalt and concrete and steel, he needed to learn to steer.

So I was willing to allow Colin to collide with a few trees as a part of helping him learn to avoid more dangerous things like oncoming cars and buses and trains. See, God could spare us some pain by taking wrong choices off the menu. But as we've talked about before, a world without choice is also a world without love. Because real love, whether we're talking about love for God or love for one another, requires a choice. My friendship to you isn't really love if I'm only a puppet with no choice about it.

If I'm only worshiping God because he programmed me to do that, there's no joy to him in being worshiped. So some people suggest that since God gave humanity free will and people invariably exercise free will to do evil things, then evil is God's fault. But the reality is, God created everything good. He only permitted the possibility of evil by allowing us the freedom to choose. It's not God, it's people.

Adam and Eve and you and me and every other human being who's ever lived on planet Earth who abused the free will that God gives us. And in the process, we make evil a reality. Well, here's a second question. And that question is, is God all powerful? We Sometimes sing songs of worship that contain big words like omnipotence.

To be all powerful. What does that mean? When we say that God is all powerful, do we mean that there is nothing God can't do? Actually, no. That's not what we mean at all.

There are clearly there are biblically things that God can't do. God cannot cease to exist. To be is a part of who God is. God can't lie God. God can't make mistakes.

God can't give us minds of our own without opening the door to the possibility that we will misuse that freedom and we will choose evil and cause suffering. God is unimaginably, indescribably powerful. And yet he is also limited in certain ways by his own nature. You ever wonder why people get away with so much evil? I think the question we should ask ourselves is, do they really?

I mean, just because a killer is not in prison at this very moment doesn't mean that he'll never get caught. And even if evil people manage to escape punishment their entire lives, Scripture insists that for all of us, a day of accountability and judgment is coming. Lee Strobel makes this suggestion. He says, criticizing God. I love this.

Criticizing God for not carrying out justice right now is a lot like reading half a novel criticizing the author for not resolving the plot. The story isn't over yet. We haven't experienced everything that is still to come. Pain actually has the power to teach us some significant lessons. I remember a time as a kid pretty vividly when my dad spanked me.

And that taught me to tell the truth. I can remember a time when I rode my bicycle into our neighbor's parked motorcycle. A kid. And that taught me to look up when I was writing. I remember an unpleasant jolt that taught me not to touch bare electrical wires.

I remember the heartbreak of my parents divorce. And the way that that has taught me has taught Alison as well to work extra hard in our marriage. See, when we see injustice in the world, let's not automatically assume that the reason we see that is because God is powerless or asleep at the wheel. God sometimes uses pain to teach us. The Bible says in Second Peter chapter three that God isn't late with his promise as some measure lateness.

He is restraining himself on account of you holding back the end. Because he doesn't want anyone lost. He's giving everyone space and time to change. God is loving and patient. And the reason he hasn't yet shut down all evil and painful choices is, is because he is still allowing lost people time to turn to him.

Which brings us to a third question. And that is, is God all knowing the way Scripture describes God? He has no beginning, no end, which means that his view of time is very different from ours. God told Moses in the book of Exodus that his very name is I am not, I was not, I'm going to be, but I am. God is infinite.

He's eternal. And that means that to him all times are right. Now, God can see history without being confined by it. God can see history without causing it. So can we allow that God might have a purpose that we don't yet see in allowing painful things like starvation or tsunamis, disease?

This is difficult to think about and I certainly don't have any easy answers. But how can we, limited as we are by time and space, how can we be absolutely certain that a God of unlimited wisdom would not allow certain evils to exist in order to bring about some long range big picture good that we can't possibly foresee right now? Tim Keller, in his book the Reason for God, makes this observation. Keller says, just because you can't see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean there can't be one. Given our finite vantage point.

I believe, and I would, I would encourage us to be cautious about passing judgment on the eternal plans of God. There is so much that we just can't see because of our limited vantage point. And there's no more powerful example of that than the death of Jesus. You know, when Jesus put on a mortal human body, I wonder if Satan didn't think, how stupid. I mean, when the Jewish leaders and the Roman government crucified Jesus, the devil must have felt like he'd won and he was dead wrong.

Because it was God's plan from the very beginning to make salvation possible for all of us through the death of Jesus. The prophet Isaiah wrote 700 years before Jesus was born that it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. The book of Revelation describes Jesus as the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world before we were even a thing. God had a plan to redeem us. The pain and the humiliation of the cross, which looked like Jesus ultimate defeat, actually set the stage for his resurrection, which was his ultimate victory.

And that reality brings up another assumption that often plays into our questions about the relationship between God and his goodness and pain and suffering in our world. It's the assumption that if God is loving, he must prevent suffering. If you'll indulge me, let me share one More Colin story with you. When Colin was probably first or second grade, early grade school, he got a strep infection. So we took him to the doctor and our doctor prescribed an antibiotic and a shot.

And Colin wanted no part of that shot. So he immediately began looking for a way out. At first he decided to just try yelling over and over and over again, I don't want a shot. I don't want a shot. I don't want a shot.

That didn't work. So he asked if he could go to the bathroom and he locked himself in the bathroom. I think he thought that if he stayed in there long enough, we would just forget that he was there. That didn't work either. So finally our doctor and I took him back to the exam room and we held him down, kicking and screaming on the exam table while a nurse gave him the shot.

And I can only imagine how soothing that must have been for all the people out in the waiting room. Like, what are you doing back there slaughtering a pig? I mean, it just. I'm sure it was horrible. In the moment, Colin was convinced, I'm sure, that we were trying to hurt him.

He might have thought we were trying to kill him, I don't know. But we knew that that shot would make him better, so we were willing to cause him a brief moment of pain with a needle stick that we knew would actually be really good for him in the long run. And if you're thinking that being my kid sounds like a really painful proposition, my kids would probably say you're not wrong. But here's the point, okay? If doctors and physical therapists and coaches can use short term pain for our good, do you suppose that God might be able to do that too?

See, the ultimate point of our lives is not to be comfortable. It's to be prepared for eternity. That's why the apostle Paul wrote that we rejoice in our sufferings. Does that sound crazy? We rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance.

Perseverance, character in character, hope. I think one reason that we struggle with this question of evil and pain is that we don't always fully understand God. It's. It's really impossible for us to fully wrap our, our minds and our hearts around everything that God is. The scripture says that God created everything for his own glory and pleasure.

But we sometimes find ourselves thinking that God's main job is to bless our food and help us get good grades and good jobs and keep us healthy, happy. Philip Yancey is one of My favorite writers. And Yancey observes that wealthy, comfortable Christians often pray that God would spare us from difficulties, while poor, persecuted and imprisoned Christians pay for the strength to get through their difficulties. Do you see the difference? Many of us who are accustomed to affluence and accustomed to comfort, all we can think about is God, keep me comfortable.

I've chuckled recently because one of the many H Vac companies in our community is a place called Constant Comfort. And I see their billboards and I'm sure that having heating and cooling that work, that's a really good thing. But every time I see one of their vans or billboards, it's just been a reminder to me about this message that Constant Comfort is really not God's intention. For us, rejecting God because of pain is a much more common thing among affluent people than it is among those who face suffering and deprivation on a daily basis. Is it possible that we have along the way recreated God in our own image?

Have we recast him in a way that is more palatable to us, but is actually a departure from who he really is? See, our complaints about God and our complaints about pain to God would carry more weight if God himself had never suffered. But the story of Scripture is that he has. I mean, given how sinful our world is and given how holy God is, He would be completely justified in kicking us to the curb and turning his back on us. But he didn't do that.

Not only did God create our world, but he entered into it and he experienced all of our pain. That's what Jesus, life and death were all about. Lee Strobel describes it like this. He says, just imagine every single pain in the history of the world, all rolled together into a ball, eaten by God, digested fully, tasted eternally. See, at the cross, Jesus went farther and obeyed more completely and gave more sacrificially than he ever asked anyone else.

To Jesus prophetic name that the the Book of Isaiah gives him, Emmanuel, means God with us. It's a reminder that God is right here with us in our pain. The greatest evidence for God's love is the suffering that our Savior was willing to experience for us. The book of Hebrews says, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of Grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

To me, one of the most thought provoking scenes in the Passion of the Christ comes right after Jesus dies. There's a moment in that movie when Jesus head drops to his chest and in that same moment, the clouds directly above the cross open up and a single teardrop falls from heaven and it strikes the ground with the force of an earthquake. Now, there's some creative license going on there. Obviously Scripture doesn't specifically describe that, but philosopher Peter Kreeft makes this statement. He says God's answer to the problem of suffering is that he came right down into it.

What more could God do to show us his love than to put on flesh and experience everything about this life in this world that hurts. I mean, even if we could explain all the pain in the world and we can't, it still wouldn't be fun. I mean, even if pain isn't God's fault, even if we have some degree of confidence that God can use pain for our good, it still hurts and it still discourages and it still threatens to steal our joy. So what do we do? Well, could I challenge us in a couple of practical ways, some things that we could do at a practical level to help us to deal with this tension.

Challenge number one is this. I would encourage us to recognize that pain is a temporary and even necessary part of life. Pain is temporary, it doesn't last forever, and sometimes it's necessary. Scripture is full of people to whom God gave victory only after they face great suffering. I mean, even after Satan took his family and his wealth and his health, Job clung to his faith in the goodness of God and God restored it all.

Joseph was sold as a slave by his own brothers. He was wrongly imprisoned for something he did not do. And he went through all of that for some time before God finally raised him to a place of influence in the land of Egypt and used him to save thousands of people from starvation. Esther was forced into a pagan king's harem and faced with a threat of genocide before God used her to save the lives of her people. You and I read those stories in the Bible and we get all the way to the end.

And we're able, in hindsight, to see how everything played out. And it makes a great veggie tale.

But to Job and to Joseph and to Esther, in the midst of that story, they didn't have any certainty about that outcome. And they had to grapple with their questions and their fears and their pain. And trust God in the midst of all of that suffering is one of the Holy Spirit's tools in helping us to become more like Jesus. The apostle James wrote this. Again, this sounds crazy.

Consider it pure joy. 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. It implies that without some suffering and difficulty, maturity will elude us. Paul wrote that we glory in our sufferings.

Imagine that we glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character hope. You know, a lot of people would say that what gave them strength, what gave them stamina, what enabled them to experience success in life, actually came to them through pain and difficulty. Have you encountered those people? Oftentimes people who are very strong got that way by enduring some really difficult things along the way. When was the last time you met someone with a lot of drive and significant stamina and great perseverance who developed all of that grit by sleeping in and watching Netflix and eating Cheetos?

A life of ease and constant comfort really doesn't produce in us the kind of character that God desires. There's a scene in another of my favorite movies, the Princess Bride, where Buttercup accuses Wesley of mocking her pain. And this is his reply. He says, life is pain, highness. And anyone who says differently is selling something.

The idea of a pain free life in this sin broken world is a sales pitch that is not reality. Jesus himself said this. Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble. It is a guaranteed thing. But take heart.

Jesus said, I have overcome the world. This isn't all there is. And that's why Paul was able to write, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Life is hard, and it's certainly not my intention today to suggest anything different than that. But what God has in store for all of us who love and trust him will overshadow not just the hard things about this life, but the very best things too. Do we think about that?

It's not just that when this life is over and we go to be with Jesus, that all of the pain of this life will be swallowed up the good things about this life will be overshadowed, too. You and I have been invited as followers of Jesus, into an existence with him that will cause us to look back on the very best days of this life, our greatest achievements and our biggest milestones and our most exciting experiences and wonder in hindsight, what in the world were we so excited about? Because the existence we will have with him there will overshadow all of it. So there's a second challenge that goes along with this question, and that is a challenge to reach out with God's love to others in their pain. Most of the time, the pain that we're most aware of is our own.

You and I notice when we're sick. We notice when we're struggling financially, we notice when we are lonely. But we don't always notice those same hurts in other people's lives. And even when we do, we may tend as our first reflex to look for someone else, especially God, to step up and help and make the problem go away. Meanwhile, God has called us, his people, his church, to love and serve and care for others.

So this challenge that Lee Strobel raises in his book the Case for Faith is really convicting. Lee Strobel says before we ask God why He allows poverty, starvation and injustice when he could do something about it, we ought to consider how we'd answer if he asked us that same question. See, suffering exists not only because evil people do cruel things, but because even some of us who want to do what's good don't always do what we're capable of to help those who are hurting. We can't always heal illness, but we can certainly care for those who are sick. We can't end poverty, but we can share what we have with those who are in need and are part of our relational circle.

One way many of us do that regularly is by giving to Operation Care, a ministry right here in our our church that provides a lot of assistance to local families in need. We can't instantly cure depression, but we can sit with someone who's struggling. We can't bring back someone's deceased loved one, but we can hug them while they grieve.

If you watch the news much, you know that the pain in our world can feel almost overwhelming sometimes, and there's no getting around it. But I love what Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, said. Bob said, don't fail to do something just because you can't do everything. Do you wrestle with that tension? It seems like the hurt is so big, the problems are so huge.

The difficulty is so overwhelming. What could my little life do? What possible difference could I make? One life at a time, one relationship at a time, one conversation, one gift, one encouraging word, one prayer at a time. You and I are empowered by the Holy Spirit to make a significant difference in this world.

I don't like pain any more than you do, and I sure can't explain all of it. Our goal today and our goal with this series is not to minimize any struggle that you're facing right now. But I do know this. I know that God loves us so much that he chose to step into our world and suffer in our place for our sins. And because he did, we not only know that God understands and empathizes with our pain, but we have confident hope that we will eventually join him forever in a place where there is no more suffering, there is no more pain or mourning or crying or death.

That's what we envision when we read all the way to the end of the Bible. You know, every time we come together as a church family on Sundays, one of the things that we do is a moment that we call communion. It's a time where we come together to remember what Jesus did for us. So along the front of the room and along the back wall, there are several tables. And each table has a a tray on it that contains some double stacked plastic cups.

The bottom cup has a small piece of bread in it. That bread is just a symbol. It's a reminder of the body of Jesus that was literally nailed to a cross for our sins. The top cup contains a small amount of grape juice. Again as a symbol.

It's a reminder of the blood of Jesus that He voluntarily allowed to be shed on that cross for our sins. And when we come together, this isn't just a private Jesus and me moment. This is something we come together as a family, as the people of God, to remember that he has purchased all of us from the dead end, self centered, sinful way of living that this world characterizes as normal. God has done everything necessary to liberate us from that. And as he calls us out of that life into his family, we celebrate that together every time we gather in worship.

So I'm going to lead us in prayer and then after I, I do that, we just want to invite you, when your heart is ready, to make your way to whichever one of those communion stations is closest to you. But let's use this time to come together as the people of God in gratitude that Jesus chose not to distance Himself from our pain, but actually to step right into it. Let's pray, Father. God, we thank you this morning for the way that you love us. Thank you, God, for calling us together as your family.

We're grateful for the humble and courageous selfless gift that Jesus offered us at the cross.

And we thank you, God, that while the world we live in is a hurtful mess a lot of the time. We thank you, God, that there is hope. We thank you for your people. We thank you for your word and your spirit and all the different ways in which your spirit is mobilizing your people to push back darkness, to speak hope into places of despair, to offer compassion, Father, in places of hurt. We ask, Lord, that you would help us to open our eyes to what your spirit desires to do through us.

And we thank you, God, for this reminder of what you accomplished on a cross and through an empty tomb. And we thank you, God, for the hope and the peace and the life and the purpose we find as a result of that. Lord, we love you. Your love for us is so amazingly evident. And we thank you for that.

In Jesus name, amen.