Tough Questions: Part 1 - Why Did God Let It Happen?
Psalm 73:11-26; Philippians 2:6-8; Deuteronomy 38:8; JOHN 3:16
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Welcome. Happy to be worshiping with you all this morning. I'm excited. We are kicking off a new series, as Pastor Andre said, tough questions, honest answers. And we are going to hit some pretty tough questions. I know the questions that are coming, and I know what we're talking about today, and we're going to hit some hard ones. But I'm excited for it because I think that dealing with these questions will actually help our faith grow deeper. I think a lot of times we approach these questions with some fear or some worry that maybe we don't know how to answer these questions. We don't know where to get the answers. Maybe we just, ignorance is bliss. We would just rather not know the answer and just kind of go along with life. Maybe we've tried to find answers, and in the past we have talked to leadership in churches or fellow believers and we haven't gotten really good answers. They haven't satisfied the question. Or maybe they haven't, you just knew that something wasn't right. They weren't biblically sound. They weren't theologically sound. Perhaps you even maybe avoided the questions because you're afraid of the answer. Maybe you just aren't really sure that you want to know the answer to this question because it could impact the way you live. It could impact the decisions that you make. It could challenge some of beliefs. And so it's just easier to not address the questions. Maybe you're like me. I was perfectly, just to be honest, I was a little nervous when I saw that we were doing this series. I'm like, wait, we have to answer these questions? Like that's what we're doing? Because I, for those of you that don't know, I'm not great at confrontation. I get nervous. I don't love that. I can think of a really great response in about three to five business days. But in the moment, I'm not great at it. I just, part of it too is I think that I feel like the confrontation is threatening our relationship. And so I get nervous.
And what I realized in preparing for this is that some of these questions feel like they are threatening our faith. That if we are like, well, if I don't have these answers or if I'm not sure what these answers are, If I'm asking these questions and I don't know, then maybe it's threatening my faith. And I'm telling you, it is not. Pastor Chris set us up great last week with our Easter service and talking about doubt and how Thomas doubted and how doubt was not the problem. It's what we do with the doubt. It's taking those questions to Jesus. It's asking him for help. It's being like the father who had the demon-possessed son that said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. That's what we do with these questions and with this doubt. So some of the questions we're going to hit on, does God love me? Why didn't God answer my prayers? And the one we're going to focus on today is why did God let it happen? There's an old church tradition where I say God is good and you say all the time. And then I say all the time and you say God is good. So we're going to try, okay? Right? God is good all the time. Okay. It was fine. It was all right. But we're going to do it again, okay? God is good all the time. There you go. Much better. All right.
Well, we say this. We say God is good all the time. But do we actually believe it? Do we actually believe that God is good all the time? Or maybe a more specific question is, do we believe God is good to me? I think a lot of us can think God is good. He's good to other people, but he's not always good to me. So the question that we got to look at is, do we believe that God is good? And if he is still good, why does he let bad things happen? Do we believe that he is still good when we lose the job? When a loved one dies? When we have financial stress, relationship issues, children struggling, do we still believe that he's good? What about bigger than that, like nationwide issues or global problems, wars, famine, children starving, political turmoil? Do we still believe that God is good? And is he good? If he is good, why does he allow suffering? Why does he allow bad things to happen? This is an important question that I think we really need to wrestle with. 300 years before Jesus was even born, there was a Greek philosopher named Epicurus, and he was asking some of these questions, and he came to a few conclusions. He said, if God is not able to prevent evil, then he's not all-powerful. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he's not all good. If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist? So today we're talking about the problem of evil and suffering, but really it comes down to what we believe about God. The problem of evil and suffering is not new. I mean, Epicurus lived 300 years before Jesus, and we can go even further back, back to the garden. When sin entered the world, the problem of suffering and evil existed. And many have tried to reason with it, figure it out, understand it, reconcile it with who God is. And it's a tough thing to wrap our mind around. But ultimately, it comes down to what we believe about God and his character. See, I think a lot of times we struggle with that. we struggle with God's character and suffering because we think it's contrary. But evil and suffering is not contrary to the story of the Bible. Evil and suffering is actually central to the story. Once sin entered the world, the overarching story of creation or of redemption involves suffering, involves evil. We would have nothing to be redeemed from if there wasn't evil and suffering in the world.
So Christianity, our faith, actually makes sense of, gives meaning to, and offers a solution for the evil and suffering we experience. I'll say that again. Christianity makes sense of, gives meaning to, and offers a solution for the evil and suffering we experience. The Bible doesn't avoid the topic of pain and suffering, so we shouldn't either. It actually addresses it in a variety of ways. We can look at many different examples. You think of Jeremiah, who was known as the weeping prophet. And he cried out to God, questioning why there was so much suffering. But it was because of the unrepentant hearts of the Israelites. You have King David. He was a king. He was loved. He was known as a man after God's own heart. And he wrote many of the Psalms, much of which were prayers crying out to God, asking, why? Where are you? Be my refuge. Be my strength, be my shelter. But why is this happening? We look in the New Testament. We just celebrated Easter that we talked about with Holy Week. Jesus is suffering. He understood suffering. He died for us. Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament, experienced immense suffering throughout his ministry. Both suffering at the hands of Romans and at the hands of Jewish leaders. but he also talks about a thorn in his flesh that he asked the Lord to take away from him, and the Lord said no. We don't know specifically what that is, but we know it caused him to suffer, and yet these people time and time again, person after person, experience after experience, suffered, and yet they stayed true to who God was. They followed him. They continued to trust him. Why is that? Why were they able to do that? Well, we see another instance of a person who was struggling with these questions.
We're going to be in Psalm 73 today. If you want to go ahead and turn there, it'll be on the screen, so you can look there in your Bible as well. We're going to be talking about Asaph. Asaph was a poet. He was a worship leader in the tabernacle for the Israelites. And he and his sons wrote many of the Psalms, including Psalm 73. In this passage, Asaph is talking about the arrogant, the arrogant people, the wicked people. And he says that he even envied them. Earlier in the passage, he said that he envied them because of their lives, that they could just kind of live however they want, do whatever they want, and yet they didn't have the consequences that he was dealing with. They didn't suffer the way he did. So we're going to pick up in verse 11, Psalm 73, 11. It says, “They, the wicked, say, How would God know? Does the Most High know anything? This is what the wicked are like, always free of care. They go on amassing wealth. Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been afflicted and every morning brings new punishments.” Our buddy Asaph here is having a little bit of a pity party, but I don't really blame him because we've all been there too. Right? In his defense, we've felt these feelings as well. We've questioned why is this happening? Why does their life seem fine, but all this bad stuff keeps happening to me? Why, God? Why is this happening? Maybe we're even trying to live rightly. We're trying to do what's right, follow the word, go to church, do the right things, and yet bad things still happen. Maybe it's the diagnosis that we weren't expecting. Kids making poor choices. A fight with our spouse, another bill coming through. It just feels like it doesn't stop. But if we're honest, I think many of us are asking, why does God allow bad things to happen to a good person like me? I think we're really, that's what we want to know. And we're going to come back to that question, so hold on to that. But first we have to answer the other question. If God is loving, why would he allow suffering? If we say God is good all the time and we believe that he is loving, he is good, why would he allow suffering? Well, it was out of his love for us that he gave us a choice. He gave us the choice to love him in return or to reject him.
But here's the thing. If love is a choice, suffering is a possibility. We can look at this issue of suffering and evil from a variety of different angles. We can look at it theologically. We can look at it emotionally. But God also gave us a brain. So we're going to look at it logically. Because there is a logical explanation here for this. Logically speaking, the only way to truly love someone is to have the choice to do it. If someone locked you in a basement and said, I will only give you food and water if you love me, what are you going to do? You're going to say I love you. Do you actually love that person? Absolutely not. But you want your food and water. You don't have a choice, so it's not actual love. God wanted a relationship with his creation. He wanted a relationship with his people. And so he had to give us the choice. He didn't want robots. He didn't want a pet rock collection. He wanted people to be in relationship with him. So he gave us the choice. It's called free will. He gave us the free will to choose love, to choose to love him, or to reject him. But in giving us this choice, it made loving God possible, but it also made choosing evil possible as well. so in order to have the freedom to choose we also had to be given the freedom to reject him to choose evil and honestly there are times when we will we will sin we will make poor choices and it will always lead to suffering so if we say we want God to remove all suffering and evil we if we say if you're good you would get rid of it all, well then he would have to remove our choice. He would have to take away our free will. And to be sure, he is powerful enough to do that. We believe he is all powerful, so he could. But he wants a relationship with us and he wants us to be able to choose him, so he's not going to remove that free will from us. Because the only two options to get rid of sin and suffering is to remove our free will or to wipe us out completely. Neither of those options seem great to me. We have the choice to love him, but that just, it comes at the risk of suffering. It comes knowing that we could cause suffering because we have the choice. We also often think that suffering is a lack of God's love. We think, okay, if God is loving, why is there suffering? But we just associate that with a lack of love, that he couldn't possibly be loving if we suffer. But we see this played out daily in our lives.
See, suffering isn't evidence of a lack of love. It actually can be proof of it. It's not evidence that he is not a loving God if we suffer. As parents, we discipline our children, not because we want to cause them suffering, but because we want to correct the behavior. We don't enjoy seeing them hurt or suffering the consequences of their actions. But if we love Jesus and we want to disciple them towards Jesus, we're going to allow those consequences to play out. We're going to help point them to Jesus. We're going to allow that suffering to happen because we love them. A couple of years ago, I got a piece of glass stuck in my foot. And I was very hopeful that it was going to work itself out. It did not. And after a couple months, I finally was able to get surgery scheduled in order to get this glass out of my foot. And about a week before surgery, it actually got infected. And I was very grateful that I had surgery scheduled because it was so painful. I could not walk on it. I couldn't touch it. It was just excruciating pain. And so I go and I go to have my surgery. But the reality of surgery is the doctor has to cut you open. He has to create a wound in order to bring healing. now that might feel a little backwards but that's the only way to go through it you have to suffer a little bit in order for the healing to come well after surgery he came up to me and he said you know I was not very confident I was going to be able to find this piece of glass because it was very tiny he said but the infection had created a pocket around it and I was able to see exactly where the glass was and pull the whole thing out. So my pain, my suffering for that week leading up to surgery where I could not even walk on my foot, I got to see the good of it. I got to see the purpose in that pain, that it actually made my healing more successful.
Now, we don't always have the good and the luxury of getting to see that play out like that, but I had to experience this pain in order to get to the healing. You see this in things like physical therapy. You know, you got to regain your strength and your movement. You see it in setting broken bones. If you don't set a broken bone, it will not heal properly and you will have many more issues down the road. Maybe even things like reprimands at work. Those are never fun, usually pretty awkward, but it helps you push you in the right direction, gets you going where you need to go. Maybe even like going through therapy or counseling, oh, those conversations can hurt. Bringing up old trauma, old wounds. But when we do it, it allows us to process through it to bring healing. All of these things, all of this suffering and pain is actually necessary. And in fact, it would be unloving to not address those issues. It would have been unloving for my surgeon to look at me and say, you know what, I'm to have to cause a wound to get the glass out, so we're just going to leave it there. That would be a bit unloving. It would be unloving as a parent to not correct my children's behavior. Because like a parent or a physical therapist or surgeon, God knows that good can come from our suffering. He loves us enough to allow the suffering to exist and then bring good from it.
Romans 8:28 says, “We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” He is so good to use our suffering for our good and for his glory. So we understand why God allows suffering in general, because it has to be allowed if we're going to have free will. But back to our other question. Why do bad things happen to good people? Because that's really what we want to know, right? That's what Asaph was asking. In Psalm 73, we want to know why does God allow good things to happen or bad things to happen to good people like me? The answer here is pretty simple. We're not good. None of us are good.
Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All have sinned. How many is all? How many is all? All of them. Every single one of us. All have sinned. None of us have met the standard. We've all missed the mark. Pastor and theologian R.C. Sproul Jr. said, “Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened to one person and he volunteered.” Jesus was the only one who lived a perfect life. He was the only good person who didn't deserve to suffer and yet he suffered for us on our behalf. Philippians 2 talks about Jesus' suffering. It says, “Who, being in very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
So not only did Jesus willingly give up the glory of heaven for a time, That was suffering already. But then he came in human likeness and had to put up with all this humanness, more suffering. But then he died the most excruciating, gruesome death on our behalf. If the God of the universe in human form, who was perfect and good, suffered, why do we think we're exempt? He was misunderstood. He was hated, betrayed, beaten, tortured, hung on a cross for us. He suffered. He literally cried out to God, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He gets it. He gets our suffering. But he's the only one who was truly good. So why do bad things happen to good people? They don't. they only happen to broken people. Not since Jesus. They only happen to sinners and broken people like us. So then we go back to our original question. Why does God allow suffering? Unfortunately, there is some mystery to this question. And I can't answer this question for every individual situation. We don't know. We don't always get to know why we suffer specific things or certain circumstances.
But I do know this. God allows suffering, but not because he doesn't love you. John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” He loves you so much he literally sent his son to suffer and die for you. I also know that he doesn't or he allows suffering but not because he's abandoned you Deuteronomy 38 8 the Lord himself goes before you and will be with you he will never leave you nor forsake you do not be afraid do not be discouraged so why was he willing to allow his son to come and suffer why is he able to promise that he will never leave us or forsake us, it's because he knows something better is coming. Even though we suffer here on this earth, he knows that something better is coming. I've heard it said before, I think I've even said it up here, if it's not good, God's not done. If some circumstances your life is not good, God's not done. Now here's the thing, that could just literally mean heaven, that it's not good until we get to heaven. There are going to be times when issues are resolved and things, suffering ends, those seasons end, and there is goodness here and now. But we also know heaven is coming. The Bible says we will suffer. Jesus says it himself. I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world. We know the end of the story. We know what's coming. There will be a day when those of us who have chosen to use our free will to love Jesus will get to meet him face to face in eternity. That we will be in eternal glory with him. And we get to live with that hope of heaven right now. Revelation 21:4 says, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.”
Something better is coming. No more pain or abuse or trauma or tragedy or addiction. Something better is coming. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. at any given moment we could enter another season of suffering something could happen we don't live in fear because of it but we we just know that that is just part of being human it doesn't seem fair it doesn't seem right we don't always have the luxury of of of hindsight and knowing why they're what the purpose of our pain is or why something happened I still have plenty of questions for the Lord. But we know that in all of it, God is still good.
Back to our friend Asaph in Psalm 73. He struggled through these tough ideas. He asked, am I keeping my heart pure for nothing? Is this all for naught? Am I trying to be good for no reason? Because everybody out there who's just living their own life, doing whatever they want, doesn't seem to be suffering. But then we get to verse 16. When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God. Then I understood their final destiny. Jumping down to verse 25. Whom have I in heaven but you? and earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Asaph didn't understand until he entered the sanctuary of God. When he entered the presence of God, that's when he got clarity. Friends, in the presence of God, there is peace. Even in the midst of our suffering, he was able to understand what truly happens to the wicked god made that clear to him that in the end there will they will have suffering too but more than that he was able to understand who god is that he is his Asaph’s strength he is Asaph’s portion and he is that for us too nothing in this world no amount of good things and no lack of suffering could satisfy us like God can. Nothing can satisfy us like God can. And when we go into his presence, when we seek him, when we read his word, when we pray, we find peace. Even in the middle of our trials, even in the middle of our suffering. Our flesh and our hearts, they will fail. They will because we're human and we often choose the evil thing. We choose sin. We choose the wrong way. We will suffer either at our own hands or the hands of others. But God is our portion. In his presence, there is peace.
I encourage you to memorize verse 26 this week. I'll read it again. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. We actually have a little option on the program on the Connect card to check that you're going to memorize it this week. We'll just all memorize it together because I think it's really important, especially when we're going through suffering, to be able to recall God's faithfulness, to remember how he has been faithful in the past, how he has brought us through our suffering. So if you would memorize this with us this week, check that box and you can drop it in the back with the ushers on your way out so we can pray for you as you're doing that. But when you are experiencing suffering, it allows you to call this scripture to mind in order to walk in that faith. It deepens your faith so that you know that he is with you. He is your portion and your strength, even during your suffering.
So again, these are big questions. The problem of sin and suffering of evil in the world, it's a hard one. But it's not contrary to the Bible or even to God's character. It doesn't count him out. It is central to the Bible and the story of redemption that he has written for us. Our faith in Jesus, our Christianity, it gives meaning to the suffering. It brings purpose to the pain, and it actually offers us a solution as we walk through suffering that we will face. He is a good God who loves us. And so if you are hurting right now, if you are experiencing suffering in some way, physical, mental, emotional, relational, whatever that may look like, Maybe you are just one of us living in a broken world, wondering where God is in all of this. I want you to know this. I need you to know that God is still good and he loves you. He is right there with you and he will never leave you. He understands because he suffered too. And in his presence there is peace. As Christians, we are living in the now and not yet. We have Jesus now. We have been saved. We have been redeemed. We have the hope of eternity, but we're not there yet. Something better is coming.
Let's pray. God, we just thank you for who you are. We thank you that you are good, that you are good on your promises, that despite our suffering, you don't change. You stay the same. We praise you that you are always with us, even in our suffering, in our struggles, in our trials. God, help us to remember how you have been faithful in the past and trust you that you will continue to be faithful going forward. Give us strength when things don't make sense. Help us not to be afraid of these tough questions, but bring them to you, bring them to your word. Seek out answers so that we can grow our roots deeper in you. That we can walk more confidently in our faith and in who you are. We love you, God. We praise you and thank you. In Jesus' name, Amen.