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Jun 01, 2014

Facing the Challenge of Evil, Pt. 1

Facing the Challenge of Evil, Pt. 1

Passage: Job 1-42

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: God is NOT Dead!

Category: Christian Apologetics

Keywords: suffering, evil, god's existence, all-powerful, all-good, loving, logic

Summary:

This message tackles the classic challenge of the problem of evil and suffering to the existence of the God of the Bible.

Detail:

Facing the Challenge of Evil—Pt. 1

Intro: Video clip excerpt from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OnWNDigXF8

One of the most potent arguments against the existence of the God of the Bible is what has been commonly called “the problem of evil.” It is potent, not so much from the logical or theological standpoint, but from the emotional and practical standpoint.

Everyone suffers.

Everyone experiences pain.

Everyone struggles, sometimes very, very deeply, with the level and severity of evil in this world.

And everyone struggles at a very personal level with God who does not always act in our own personal experience in ways that seems to us to be loving, caring, compassionate or kind.

So I come to this message today with a high level of compassion and concern. I know that for some of you, this is merely an intellectual challenge today. But I know for many of you this message touches some very raw, very tender nerves. To talk about the goodness and power of God in the context of your own personal, seemingly interminable pain, suffering, weaknesses and deep quandaries of life is far from academic. It is very present, very real, and very hard.

But it is precisely here that our experience must intersect with our theology. If ever there was a need for truth and experience to intersect it is here on the ground of human suffering. Belief and faith in God is sometimes challenging enough without the backdrop of personal suffering. But add that in and faith in…yes, even our belief in…God is often tested and stretched to the breaking point.

So please know that as we talk about sin and suffering today, it is not something we can comfortably leave in the realm of theory or untested theology. So what I will try to do today is guide us through both the logical and theological challenges to both our minds and our souls, our thoughts and our experiences.

            For starters, think back over the horrific examples of evil you have heard about in the news of just the last month or 2.

  • Abduction by Boko Harum of 300 Nigerian school girls and forced conversion, sale into slavery.
  • Sudanese Chr. woman who has been tried for blasphemy, convicted (because she has always been a Chr…but now married a Chr. man), sentenced to 100 lashes…after delivering her baby…and to death by hanging…after she raises the child for 2 years.
  • Uigur bombing in NW China killing 31, injuring 94, as terrorists threw explosives out their car windows as they simultaneously plowed into a crowded market in 2 cars.
  • April 14, 2014--A massive explosion ripped through a bus station during the morning rush hour in Nigeria’s capital, killing at least 71 people and wounding 124 in a bombing that marked the bloodiest terrorist attack ever in Abuja.

And that doesn’t include the litany of rapes, murders, child abuse, elder abuse, etc. that can be found daily in every part of the world.

But let me put it into perspective now that we have just passed THE worst century of human evil ever seen to date in the world. It is perhaps this fact that the scale and scope of evil has increased in the modern world so dramatically that has caused this age-old dilemma of evil to cause so many to question God’s existence and goodness.

While we Americans have, for the most part, been shielded from some of the worst evils that were visited upon the 20th century, we’ve had our tastes as well: World Wars I & II, Korea, Vietnam, terrorist attacks of 9-11 and resulting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On our own soil, the shootings at Virginia Tec (32), Sandy Hook Elementary (27), Columbine (13), Aurora, Colorado movie theater (12), Washington, D.C. Navy Yard (12), and just this week U.C. Santa Barbara (6) cause us all to shudder at the horrible face of evil.

But that dark catalogue of human evil gets exponentially darker when we consider that the 20th century was THE most murderous century in all history. Starting with the Ottoman massacre of one and a half million Armenians in WW I and ending with the Rwandan and Sudanese massacres in the 1990s in which nearly 3 million people have died, 100 million human beings killed in the century’s wars must be added to the more than 100 million more killed by their fellow human beings in political repression, massacre, and genocide in places like the Ukraine, the Soviet Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian killing fields, the rape of Nanking, the Nazi concentration camps and the massacres in Bangladesh and Yugoslavia.

While in some ways mankind appears to be more humane in our modern world, the paradox is that while we treat and save more people in human suffering than ever today, we also slaughter and torture more victims than ever. For example, the Rwandan bloodbath, which the world knew full-well was taking place and did nothing, was carried out at three times the speed of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and Gypsies. It was the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center slaughters every single day…for 100 straight days. It was THE most devastating mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which slaughtered a third of a million civilians in 3 days.

And what is truly frightening is that they were carried out by men and women very much like ourselves. While we would like to think that such evil is light years from our capability, post-atrocity interviews of those who pressed the buttons, pulled the triggers and swung the machetes all paint a picture of people very much like us. WE as humans are capable of both the very best and the very worst.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn has so famously written, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

And as much as we would like to think that we are learning from our mistakes by trumpeting the mantras “Never again” or “If we’d only known,” we humans keep adding by the tens of millions every decade to the evidence of something gone terribly wrong…evil…in our world.

Then we have the postmodern relativists of today who, while insisting that we must destroy any religions or ethical systems that claim absolute truth, act as if it is worse to simply judge evil than to actually do evil. If there is no God to blame for evil, then surely we humans are fully responsible. And if that is true, are we really capable or worthy of passing judgment, evil as we are?

The harsh reality for modern secularists is that the worst atrocities have been perpetrated by secularist regimes, led by secularists intellectuals and in the name of secularist beliefs. The false claims of secular intellectuals like Gore Vidal or Richard Dawkins that the “real axis of evil” today is “Judaism, Christianity and Islam” is simply…, well, false! When Dawkins says, “Only the willfully blind fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities of the world today,” he is simply lying. Secularists are the “willfully blind.” Even if you label every conceivably religiously motivated war or atrocity from the 11th century Crusades to 21st century jihadists as religiously motivated, it is but a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the modern massacres and genocides of the secularists regimes led by secularists intellectuals in the name of secularist ideologies such as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like.

So let’s set up the problem from a little more historical and philosophical basis. Watch this short video and you’ll see what the basic argument is. [See the YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qilO5AJjkvw]

So let’s take a look more closely at those 3 premises of the argument against the God of the Bible due to the problem of evil.

Premise #1: Evil and suffering exists.

As Mr. McMillan said in the video, some would argue that evil is not a thing but rather the absence of good, like darkness is not a thing, just the absence of light.

            We certainly can’t quantify evil by physical measurements like weight or size. We don’t go to the store and order a pound of evil anymore than we can go on-line for a box of love. Evil isn’t a physical “thing” but that does not mean that it doesn’t exist.

            Christianity rejects the notion that is the foundation of so many Eastern religions like Buddhism—that evil is simply an illusion and what we really need to do to deal with it is get rid of any desires in our souls that want to make the world different…better…than it is. The tragic and actual results of that approach to evil are evident in the apathy and indifference that has dominated so much of the world dominated by Hinduism and Buddhism. Just visit India and look at what is happening to over a billion people who think it is morally and spiritually wrong for you to try and help someone in suffering because you will be condemning them to a worse fate in the next cycle or reincarnation. That is a possible answer to evil, but not one most of us want to live in…especially if we were born into the “untouchable” class hundreds of millions of people are in today in India.

To the false notion that suffering and evil are simply the result of improper human desires, the God of the Bible says, “NO, they are the result of a.) the nature of creation and b.) that creation fallen or gone bad.

            First, it is important to differentiate between suffering and evil. In today’s modern western world, suffering has become equated with evil. If you are in pain, that is evil. If you are suffering financially or emotionally or relationally, that is evil itself.

            But the Bible doesn’t say that. Do you think Adam and Eve could experience pain and suffering before the Fall due to sin? If Adam stubbed his toe on a rock, did it hurt? If Eve cut her finger on an artichoke spine, did it hurt? There is nothing to indicated it didn’t. In fact, the late Dr. Paul Brand, in a book entitled The Gift of Pain (co-authored with Phillip Yancey) reminds us that pain is a gift that keeps us from further injury of our bodies. Take that gift away, as with leapers when that disease deadens their nerve endings, and you will eventually end up self-destructing through simple interaction with this world.

            So when we suffer and experience pain in life, that is not necessarily evil. It may be the result of evil. But HOW we handle suffering and what we do with it determines more often whether or not the experience is evil or good. SO much good has come in this world through the experiences of some peoples’ suffering—hospitals, modern medicine, relief organizations, scientific breakthroughs, forgiveness, love, etc.

In answer to Epicurus’ question, “From whence cometh evil?” the God of the Bible responds, “From lives and hearts turned away from the only true & living God.”

            That may have happened well before God created human beings. The demonic realm and Satan “created” evil sometime before the Fall of Adam and Eve. When Satan and a third of the angelic hosts rebelled against God, evil came into existence. And on the human plain, the same happened when Adam and Eve rebelled against God by eating the forbidden fruit. Rebellion against God is the root and stalk of evil. It isn’t just the absence of God or His goodness that is evil; it is the rejection of God and the willful turning from Him that is evil.

(And which of us here in this room can claim, by that definition, that we have never done evil…that we have always obeyed in word, thought and deed the holy, righteous requirements of the nature of our all-perfect, holy and righteous God?)

            But someone will say, “Well, God was wrong to create beings who could rebel against Him and bring evil into existence.” Dismissing the fact that we’re probably not in the best place to judge God’s actions, there are several problems with that statement.

            First, God could have created a world in which no other moral, decision-making beings existed. We could have been made to be “moral robots,” pre-programmed to make only morally good decisions. But, like it or not, we would not be humans—beings who can at any moment make moral or immoral choices. We may think that would be a preferable world or universe. But why?

That kind of universe knows very little about some of the most important attributes of God as well as humanity. That kind of world would know nothing of sacrificial love, of grace, of mercy, of empathy, of courage, of self-sacrifice, of compassion and more…because there would be no need for any of that in a world without evil and suffering.

We are free to say we would prefer a world like that, but we are in no position to declare that such a theoretical utopia IS, in fact, a better universe than what God has decided to create. Talk about arrogance!

Secondly, to blame God for the existence of evil is akin to blaming dirt for the existence of weeds. Said another way, the Being that makes evil possible is not the being who is morally responsible for evil.

ILL: If there were no dirt in this world, there would be no weeds. When you discover blackberries growing in your yard and decide to do the hard, usually painful, work of getting rid of them, do you also decide to get rid of every last molecule of dirt in your yard? No, because that same dirt can actually grow beautiful flowers and tasty vegetables.

            So with God. If you say that he is ultimately responsible for the existence of evil, you are right. But that is NOT the same as saying he is morally responsible any more than saying Ford or GM or Toyota are morally responsible for every auto injury and death. The existence of something good and the resulting consequence of a bad use of that good “something” is not the creator or designers fault; it is the user or consumer’s poor, bad and evil choices of how to use it that is at fault….especially when the Designer and Creator gives explicit instructions about how to use and not use the created thing…which He has done!

This issue also touches on what the video talked about as being “logically impossible.” Just because we can come up with some supposed conundrum doesn’t mean it is. Just because you ask the question, “Can God create a rock bigger than he can move?” doesn’t mean that God is not all-powerful if the answer is “no.” It means that your question is silly. It’s like asking, “Can God create purple that is yellow?” “Can God create darkness that is light?” Such questions reveal the misunderstanding of “all-powerful.” God can do anything that is consistent with His nature.

            So with the question, “Can God create free, moral agents w cannot sin?” the answer is, “No”…because that is a logical inconsistency. You cannot be a created, dependent moral being in this universe without having the possibility of being moral or immoral, without deciding to be dependent or independent of God.

That is also why we can hold people accountable for their actions. People choose every day, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. But if we are simply the blind, random, evolutionary product of time and chance, not a moral God, then how can we hold people morally responsible for choices. Aren’t they just acting out what the impersonal forces of natural selection and the survival of the fittest are teaching them to do?

So to this premise that evil and suffering exists, God says, “Yes they do. All evil is the result of sinful choices by sinful people and demons. And most human suffering is as well, though not all.”

On to premise #2: God is all-loving and all-powerful. To this premise, the Bible has a resounding answer—YES!

The Bible is very clear: God is both all-loving and all-powerful. He is all-powerful in that he can do anything consistent with His divine nature. He can judge and confine sin where he chooses…or he can exercise grace and mercy and patience to allow evil people to do evil things but with eventual and eternal accountability. (But what he cannot do, as we have noted, is create truly free, responsible moral agents who cannot possibly sin. That is a logical fallacy and contradiction)

As to “all-loving,” we can loudly proclaim, “YES! God always acts out of the highest notion of love towards His creation.” God hates evil and loves good. He will do all in his power to rescue self-destroyed sinners, even to the point of sacrificing Himself insofar as he can. He has made a way for morally sinful humans to be restored to Him. But he will not force us to accept his remedy. He will allow us to rebel, to hate him and to curse him. And he will still love us and offer us a better way.

This biblical understanding of God is what sets the God of the Bible off from any others man has invented. God is not a deistic god who is the absent watch-maker having created the universe, he has now gone AWAL and is indifferent to the suffering of his creation. Nor is he simply calling out to us to get rid of our desires for a better world, for an existence where truth and righteousness abound and all that is rebellious against Him is confined.

Before we leave this point, I want to acknowledge that here is precisely where our biggest personal battles with evil come, I think. Evil and suffering naturally lead us to question the goodness of God. Who doesn’t want to see their children happy, unharmed by evil and bad decisions? Good, albeit morally flawed parents, still seek to shield their children from as much pain as possible and lead them into as much good and joy as possible.

            But we still know that if we are not to become evil ourselves by trying to over-control them or over-protect them from consequences, we must allow them to experience some pain and suffering, even some evil they willingly choose, in the hopes that they will make better and better choices and become better and better people.

Having said this, can we be very honest? WHAT God allows and brings into many people’s lives leaves us with HUGE questions and real struggles. There are simply many, many diseases, atrocities, accidents and evils that test us to the breaking point and leave us with really momentous challenges to our faith.

            Here is where we must come to grips with our humanness as well as God’s divinity. On the human side, we must recognize that we have a passion for questioning that does not know when to stop. There is something in us that refuses to be silent in the face of mystery. We hate living within the limits of what we know and can know in this life. Sometimes that hatred and questioning becomes evil itself.

            If you don’t believe me, read Job. Here is horrendous evil done to a very good man. God himself rates Job as “blameless and upright, [a man who] feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). He was a good man who suffered great pain, suffering and, yes, evil of just about every sort.

  • He experienced the ravages of war when the Sabeans attacked and carried off his wealth in the form of oxen and donkeys, but only after they had slaughtered every one of his servants under his protection, leaving only one to tell Job the horrific tale.
  • He experienced natural disaster as “the fire of God fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants” (Job 1:16). Talk about an “act of God”! Again, all he had and the people he cared for and about who worked for him were killed by God himself…from heaven…for no reason…at least as far as Job could tell.
  • Another lone survivor of a servant relayed the tragic news of multiple raiding Chaldean parties who destroyed Job’s trading business, looted all he had and murdered more of his servants.
  • But the biggest blow to come was when his 10 children—seven sons and 3 daughters—were all killed by a brutal wind storm. Surely God could have prevented that. And WHY WOULDN’T HE have done so IF he was all-loving and all-good. Surely such a natural disaster could fit easily under umbrella of an all-powerful God.
  • But the rest of the book recounts perhaps even greater suffering than this—the loss of Job’s own health and of every human relationship from wife to friends. Piled on all that is the horrible silence of God himself in the midst of this unimaginable pain.

But the book and experience of Job gives us some of the greatest truth and hope that most of us will need at some time in life if we are to hold a faith that survives the evils of this world. Here are just a handful…but what a powerful handful.

1.) Unexpected, unbidden and unwanted suffering, pain and evil will come into our lives for reasons we may not know in this life.

As much as Job argued with his friends and his God, he never in this life, to the best of our knowledge, got the answers to his deepest questions about WHY all this suffering. Even when God came to him in the whirlwind at the end and unloaded His own barrage of questions Job could not answer, God did not pull the curtain of heaven or knowledge back for him to understand why he had to face a life with so much pain and so much good.

            Don’t expect God to answer all your questions in this life.

2.) Living righteously will not vaccinate us against pain and suffering. It will not shield us from genuine evil in this world. That expectation is surely mistaken and bound to set us up for profound disappointment. At the beginning, God makes it clear, in the heavenlies at least…before all the heavenly hosts…that Job is innocent. What is about to befall him is not connected to his sinfulness. It is actually the result of his righteousness. He would not have been the special target of Satan’s attack were it not for the level of his uprightness. Living godly will sometimes produce more suffering and injustice in our lives than living like the ungodly. Just ask our Christian brothers and sisters in South Sudan or Iraq or India or China. Living godly in Christ may bring more suffering in this life than if we lived as the ungodly.

3.) If we do not know the answers to why we or others are suffering, it is better not to say we do. Here was the error of “Job’s comforters.” Their world-view demanded a one-to-one correlation between suffering and sin. Job must be suffering because of his sin somewhere, sometime, somehow. But both the beginning and end of the book make it abundantly clear that is not the case.

            At the same time, the end of the book, where God speaks judgment against these “comforters” and “friends”, makes it clear that they were decidedly wrong in their assessment of both the reason for suffering and their proposed remedy.

            But interestingly, “Job’s mistake turns out to the mirror image of that of his faithless friends, thought for a better reason.” Where Job’s friends erred in believing in a one-to-one accounting for sin in suffering, Job believed God owed him a one-to-one explanation for his suffering. When he doesn’t get it, he dares to try to clear his own name by accusing God himself of injustice, not knowing either God or what is truly at stake in the story. [Os Guinness, Unspeakable—Facing Up to the challenge of Evil, p. 205.]

4.) It is acceptable, even preferable, to argue and interact with God about the evils and suffering of life rather than turn away from Him in anger and disillusionment.

            The proof of this is in the end of the book of Job. While God silences Job’s protestations of his own rightness and God’s injustice in light of life’s evils, God never rebukes him for all his questions, his hurt, or even his anger. God would far rather have us engage with him, even debate with him, than he would turn from Him and cut ourselves off from him.

            Ultimately only the presence of God, either in this life or the next, will satisfy or silence our deepest groaning and questions about the most painful experiences of life. God’s silence was, I think, the most difficult part of Job’s entire trial. So it is with us. Those times in life when pain and suffering seem to empty our lives of God’s palpable presence are the darkest valleys. When God seems most distant and silent (even though he has promised never to leave or forsake us) is when our faith is tried the most. And there will be those times.

We must stop here for today but we will continue this topic next week and look at the 3rd premise of the challenge of evil.

So WHAT are we to take with us from all of this. Choose one of two of what we have touched on today.

1.)    Evil and suffering are very real. Hate evil as God does…and even the suffering it inevitably leads to. But don’t confuse suffering in your life with evil. Both suffering and evil will come unbidden to all of us.

2.)    Never let go of the twin truths that God is both all-loving and all-powerful. In times of suffering and evil, sink your spiritual teeth into the truth of the Word of God. Chew on the reality that your heavenly Father is loving all the time. Let him mature your understanding of that immense love He has for you. And don’t let suffering and evil in this life undermine your knowledge that He is all-powerful—able to do anything consistent with His nature…which is, at times, inconsistent with our and even His “desires.”

The cross of Christ with all its suffering, injustice, evil and pain, is the greatest proof of this. Neither the Father nor the Son “desired” the cross. But they both knew it was the only way to redeem mankind. God could have walked away from the incarnation and the cross and been fully just, holy and true. But his love for us…for US…made the incarnation and the cross his chosen will.

3.)    Find refuge in the only God who suffers for and with His children. The God we serve is no distant observer of the horrible nature of sin, suffering, evil and death; He is in intimate alley who has felt (and in some ways continues to feel) its searing pain in our battle against it.

4.)    Never stop the conversations with God about evil and suffering…even if those conversations are contentious. God wants us in our anger, our groaning, our wrong accusations, our misguided thinking and a whole lot more. Like a father who holds tightly a little child who is kicking, screaming, cursing and bighting for whatever reason, our heavenly Father is well able to absorb the wildest rants and temper tantrums while holding us tightly in His loving arms.

COMMUNION: a physical reminder of what God is willing to experience of evil and suffering so that we can experience Him.