One of the most frequently raised objections to Christianity is the problem of evil. How can a good God exist if there is so much pain and suffering in the world? I this message, we’ll explore what the Bible says about this classic existential dilemma.
Transcription (automatically-generated):
If you're not aware, our church has a disproportionately high number of people who are dealing with infirmities, diseases, illnesses, and sicknesses. There are many suffering in our church in other ways as well. And suffering, as I just indicated, takes many forms. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee that everybody is going to deal with suffering in their life and will do so many times.
But not everybody deals with suffering the same way. Some handle it better than others. For some, it brings out the best in them, making them more like Jesus and serving as a positive witness to those around them. For others, it brings out the worst in them, embittering them, filling them with anger, resentment, depression, and making them just someone who's toxic to be around. The question we want to tackle in this new miniseries is what should suffering look like in the life of a Christian?
What should it look like? What do Jesus and His Word tell us about how we should view suffering and how we should walk through it? And to answer the question, how should we view suffering? We need to begin by tackling one of the most frequent objections to theism to the existence of God, commonly referred to as the problem of evil. It's the question behind questions like why does suffering exist?
Why is there pain and evil in the world? If God is good, then why does he allow all the suffering and evil that we see in the world? Either he must not be powerful enough to do anything about it, he must not be real, or he must not care. Those are big questions. They're really big questions.
If you're a Christian, you need to know the answers to these kinds of questions. Perhaps you still have these questions as a Christian, but you're afraid to ask them. You don't need to be, because there are really good answers. Not easy answers, but good and true answers. Clear answers.
Pain and suffering feel inherently wrong to pretty much everybody when they show up in a major way in our lives or the lives of those we love, there's this underlying feeling that things should not be this way. Something has gone wrong. And so, we mourn, we lament, we grieve, we get angry when suffering interrupts our lives and the lives of those we love. When you think about it, that's very odd, because in the secular worldview, pain and suffering have been part of life since the world began. They are, by definition, normal, unextraordinary.
And yet, as a species, we have not adopted the attitude of "C'est la vie," that's life another day, another tragedy. When it comes to pain and suffering, isn't it strange? When someone we love is suffering, we don't say, hey, you know, statistically this was inevitable. We don't do that. But it makes no sense for us to view pain and suffering as tragic when it is, by definition, normal to be expected.
I suggest the reason pain and suffering feel so wrong to us is because pain and suffering were never meant to exist. Our soul knows deep down that things were not meant to be like this. Something has indeed gone very wrong with humanity and with our world. This is going to be your first fill-in. We're going to go on a journey today.
Write this down. Our souls testify that pain and suffering should not exist. And something has gone wrong in our world. Our souls know deep down that things should not be this way. So, let's talk about why suffering exists.
What the Word of God, the Bible, says about it? The scriptures describe a world created by Jesus free of pain and suffering. A perfect world. So, we can compare the world that God gave us to the world that we experience today. The Bible begins with Genesis, chapter one, verse one.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And it goes on to describe Jesus creating everything the sun, the stars, plants, animals. And as he's doing this step by step, he's looking at his creation and he's declaring, this is good. And we can't even begin to fathom the depths of what it meant. When God said of the earth, this is good, he was saying that all of creation was in a state that the Hebrews call shalom.
It means a state of peace, a state of balance, a state of rest, a state of beauty. Everything as it should be - shalom animals were herbivores. There was no savagery in nature. It was good on a level and in a way we cannot comprehend.
No mosquitoes go swimming in the ocean. There's no sand hidden somewhere in your body when you get out the water. Everything's perfect. And into this beautiful, perfect creation, God places the whole point of his creation, man and woman made in his image to be his sons and daughters. And when he looked at them, he declared, they are good.
There was apparently no death and there was no work in the sense that nothing was laborious or cumbersome. The only tasks that they had to do were interesting and joyful and life-giving. And they felt like they had more energy when they had completed the task than when they had begun. And they didn't have to work to eat. They would just grab fruit off whatever tree was near them.
And it was all good. It was all satisfying. It was all nutritious. This was a world so good, they didn't even need pants. I say that jokingly.
But this world was a world without body issues as well. It was a world without self-consciousness. It was a world without lust. It was completely free of all that junk. So, write this down.
The world Jesus gave humanity was good. And when we say good, we mean perfect. The world Jesus gave humanity was good. It was perfect. And God's only instructions to Adam and Eve were to have dominion over the earth and to multiply.
God created man to steward and rule over all the creatures and resources of the Earth. God put man. He put us in charge of the earth. He gave it to us. Jesus gave the title deed, so to speak, of his creation to us and said, Rule over the Earth, be blessed, have lots of babies, which is a wonderful assignment in a world where pregnancy and childbirth are completely painless.
And I want to make sure you don't miss this, so I'm going to say it again. The world Jesus gave humanity was perfect. It was perfectly good. So, if I give you something precious and beautiful to take care of, and I go on a journey and I come back and it's broken, what does that mean? Well, it means something went wrong on your watch.
Something went wrong on your watch. But before we get to what happened, I want to remind us of why God chose to create us. The Bible tells us that God is complete in every sense of the word. He lacks nothing. He needs nothing.
And he's not made more complete by having anything added to Himself. He's not lonely. He's not insecure. He's not bored. He is entirely self-sufficient within the Trinity.
Now, think of a married couple that doesn't have kids yet. Can I tell you what converging they're not having? They're not saying, you know what? We've got too much spare money. We need to have some kids.
They're not saying, you know, I was thinking, like, we're banking a solid 8 hours of sleep every night. We got to do something about that. Let's have some kids. They're not doing that. They're not saying, man, I am so sick of all this free time.
We got to do something about this, babe. Let's have some kids. Nobody even thinks that. But there's something inside us that wants to share our lives with our own children. There's something that says, wouldn't it be cool to have little versions of ourselves to bless and to share life with?
Wouldn't it be wonderful to invest in them and watch them grow and love them? We don't need kids. But kids are a blessing to us, and we get that from being made in the image of our Heavenly Father, because that's why God made Adam and Eve, and that's why God made you and me. He doesn't need us, but incredibly, he can be blessed by us. So write this down.
We were created because God wanted to share Himself and His goodness with his children. That's why we're here. God wanted to share Himself and His goodness with his children. And let me tell you, my kids are a blessing to me. Their hugs, hearing them say, I love you, dad, or when they're teenagers, settling for it.
What's up, Dad? Watching them grow, sharing experiences with them, watching them love and serve others. They bless me so much. I'm so grateful for them. But you know what wouldn't bless me?
If instead of six kids, I had six robots who were programmed to hug me and say, I love you, dad, regularly. Even if they did all the same stuff that my kids do. Now, why wouldn't that bless me? If they were doing all the same things my kids do, what would be the difference? We all know intrinsically, don't we, that the difference is free will.
The difference is choice. Affection and relationship with a being who has free will is significant on an incalculably higher level than affection and relationship with an automaton. A being that has no control over its behaviors or actions. A being that is simply following its programming. For love to exist, there must be the choice to not love.
If the option to not love does not exist, then the option to love cannot exist. There has to be a choice. If affection and relationship are to have any meaning at all, a person must have free will. We all get this, even if we've never been able to articulate it with words. God gave Adam and Eve free will by creating what Genesis 29 describes - the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden as well as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
So, God placed two trees in the middle of the garden that we commonly call Eden. One was the Tree of Life. They could eat from that all they wanted and assumedly experience benefits we cannot imagine. We don't know what those benefits were, but we can trust that they were amazing. But there was also a second tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And this is what the Lord told Adam about that tree. The Lord commanded the man. This is Genesis 216. You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. So, God created man truly good, innocent, pure, righteous.
And God placed man in a truly good world and gave him authority over it. And through the presence of the two trees, God gave man free will. The choice to love, obey, trust, and serve God or not. In the warning God gives to Adam, he doesn't say, if you eat the forbidden fruit, I will resent you forever and make your life miserable. He doesn't say, if you eat the forbidden fruit, you'll be enlightened by the whole truth.
And I can't have that? No. What does God say? He says on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. At this point, Adam and Eve could not know what that meant.
But they knew it would be terrible. The result of disobeying God. Rejecting God would not be a telling-off or a slap on the wrist. The result would be catastrophic death. Inevitable and unavoidable.
Death would enter creation and affect everything. So, make a note of this. God gave humanity the free will to follow him and choose life or reject him and choose death. Reject him and choose death.
And you might think that this is going to be God inflicting death upon them, but that's not what God is saying. God is the only source of everything good, including life, love, peace, joy, hope, goodness, all these good things. But the only way to be connected to the source of those things is to serve Him and worship Him and follow Him as Lord. When you say, I don't want to be connected to you God, you become disconnected from the only source of everything good. And all there is on the other side is death.
God doesn't have to inflict death upon you. Death is all there is outside of God. You choose death when you choose to reject God. Those are the only two options. That's what God is saying.
He's saying if you choose to reject me, if you choose to disobey me, you are by default chosen death. And it will come for you, and you will not escape. The Bible says that God is love. God is the supreme being and his supreme ethic, his supreme characteristic is love. And God is so devoted to the ethic of love that even the angels in heaven, in a way we can't fully understand, have free will.
He gives them a choice. How do we know that? Well, because one of only two archangels in heaven was a being named Lucifer. And with his free will, Lucifer attempted an insurrection, a coup to make himself equal with God. To make a long story short, it did not go well.
He was cast out of heaven by the other archangel, Michael, and fell to the earth as Satan. And you know what happened next. Here's what the Bible says. Genesis three, verse four. No, you will certainly not die.
The serpent said to the woman. In fact, God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. So, they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Suddenly, by disobeying God, their eyes are opened to all the ways they could disobey God that they had never considered before. Sin enters them and, in that moment, they become ashamed and aware of their nakedness, and their innocence is lost. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden.
At the time of the evening breeze and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So, the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. Then he asked, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?
The man replied, though the Romans you gave to be with me. She gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate. So, the Lord asked the woman, what have you done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. Write this down.
This is what happened. Adam and Eve chose to believe Satan, the deceiver over Jesus, their creator.
Even though God had only ever been good to them, only ever done good for them. In a moment, they chose to believe that God was the liar and Satan was the one telling the truth. In a tragic irony, Satan deceived man with the same lie. He was deceived with the belief that he should be God. It led to the downfall of Satan and the same wicked desire, the desire to be one's own God led to our downfall.
And immediately things began to unravel. Adam and Eve became self-conscious and ashamed of their nakedness. They felt guilt over their sin and the mess they had made. And so, they ran away from God, hid from him. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed Satan and both refused to take responsibility for their sin.
Sin moved fast through creation, and everything began unraveling. Physical death entered the world for the first time because the universe was now subject to entropy -decay - and everything began slowly dying. People, animals, the earth, the universe itself, everything. Pain entered the world as pregnancy and childbirth became physically traumatic. Strife between husband and wife entered the world as their selfish pride and desires created constant difficulties in marriage.
Man now had to work and labor and strain to get the ground to produce food. It now felt like the earth was working against him as he battled thorns and weeds and thistles and felt his body ache. At the end of the day, animals began to eat each other, and man began to eat animals. And Adam and Eve would have to deal with the first murder, their son Cain, who would later murder their son Abel. Everything began to unravel when man invited sin into God's perfect creation.
Death has entered everything. It's entered our thinking, our actions, our DNA, everything. You remember how earlier I shared that God gave the title deed of the earth to man, so to speak? Well, when man chose to submit to the council of Satan rather than the council of God, something happened with that. In some mystical but very real way.
We gave the title deed of the earth to Satan by choosing to obey him instead of God.
In that moment, we collectively, as the human race, gave our rights over the earth and over our own lives to Satan. Write this down humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Humanity's rejection of God transferred ownership of the earth to Satan and caused its fall into sin. Many Christians have never heard this, and they don't understand that the Bible teaches this, but it does. Paul called Satan the God of this age, and Jesus called him the ruler of this world three times in the Gospel of John, when Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness.
At the beginning of Jesus' earthly ministry, do you remember what the final temptation was? Matthew's gospel says this the Devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, I will give you all these things if you will fall down and worship me. You can read that account in Matthew, Mark, and Luke's Gospels in each one. Jesus does not object to the validity of Satan's offer.
Jesus doesn't say, what are you talking about? You don't own the kingdoms of this world. Jesus doesn't object because Satan did own the kingdoms of this world. They were his to offer because he held the title deed of the earth. Now, before any of us get mad at Adam and Eve for ruining our perfect start, we need to understand that the Bible makes it clear that not only would we all have done the same thing, but we have all done the same thing.
Isaiah 53 six says it like this we all went astray like sheep. We all have turned to our own way. What Isaiah was saying is that every single one of us has rejected God and done our own thing instead at some point and many times over. And while it may not sound like a big deal at first, the first time that we decided we wanted to do what we want instead of what God wanted us to do, in that moment, we were rejecting God just like Adam and Eve did. In that moment, we Derbe choosing to be our own God instead of serving and following God.
God gave us the right to choose. He gave us free will. Because love cannot be a forced action. It must be a choice. And every single one of us has chosen to reject God at some point in our lives, and some of us are still doing it right now.
So make a note of this at some point, we have all made the same decision Adam and Eve made. We've all made the same decision. And when Adam and Eve sinned, sin came rushing into the world, and with it came disease and sickness and pain and suffering and violence and all these things that we know deep down are wrong with the world. And here's the mind-blowing brutal truth. God has only given us what we wanted.
We wanted to rule over ourselves and be the masters of our universe. We wanted to reject God and set the rules for ourselves. But we can't sustain the universe by the breath of our mouth. And so, the universe is dying. We can't change the heart of a man from evil to good, and so evil persists in our world.
We were hopelessly corrupted by sin. And we cannot go back in time and undo our sinful choices because we would just make them again in another way. Where does pain and suffering come from? It comes from humanity, comes from people. It comes from the sin of the human race.
Because the downside of free will is the option to choose evil over good. If you want a universe in which love exists, then free will must exist too. And wherever there is free will, there will be those who choose evil over love and their decision will inflict violence, pain, horror, and suffering upon other people. And our collective sin has brought brokenness and sickness and disease to everyone. It's the price of free will.
It's the price of having the option to choose love. Genuine free will requires not only the option to choose but also that the consequences of our choices be allowed to unfold and affect the lives of others and indeed the world around us. And that is exactly what God gave to Adam and Eve. He gave them genuine free will, the ability to make choices that have consequences, repercussions that have resonated throughout history as a result. Write this down if you're not tracking with me yet.
The brokenness of the world is humanity's fault. It's humanity's fault.
We have had thousands of years of human civilization and the world that we have built indicts, all of us collectively. I've talked about this before. We have the medicine to cure diseases that are still killing millions around the world. Do we do it? No.
Why not? One reason. We love money more than people. We've created incredible new technologies, ways to move goods from one side of the world to the other. But do we use it to solve poverty around the world?
No. We use it to find a new class of slaves in another part of the world where we don't have to see anything and people work for a dollar a day or less so that we can have horse stuff. That's what we did with the miracle of modern travel. New ways to enslave and exploit mankind. I was thinking about this this week.
Remember when social media was starting, and it was going to create better, more connected relationships? Remember that classic? Oh, man, what is it now? It's a tool for brainwashing the culture. It brings out the absolute worst in us.
It raises children to be violent, attention-seeking, narcissistic, depressed, anxious, and insecure. It rewards antisocial and selfish behavior and praises the ugliness in us. It invades our lives, learning all about us so we can be sold more things that we don't need and manipulated by those who want to change the way we think. We don't use any new technology to do anything noble. Hardly ever.
I've talked about this before. Our culture is so obsessed with sex, and its connection to technology is I just wait. Anytime there's a new technology, I just know they're just going to try and figure out how to use it for sex. The Internet? Oh good, we can have porn everywhere, all the time. Virtual reality goggles? Let's use it for porn. Robots? Oh good, we can help disabled people. Or we could make sex robots.
This is just the world we live in. So depraved. And it happens over and over and over again, and it's so glaring. The world that we have built is a mountain of evidence proving that collectively, humanity is not good. We are not naturally good.
We haven't just made a few little mistakes here and there. We're not good, and we can't make ourselves good. And technology does nothing to make us more good. On the contrary. In Psalm 53, David observed those about humanity the fool says in his heart, there is no God.
They are corrupt and they do vile deeds. There's no one who does good. God looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God. All have turned away. All alike have become corrupt.
There's no one who does good, not even one. That's what David saw when he looked at the world around him. By rejecting God, we broke ourselves and we broke our world. And we can see the effects of our collective sin every time we read or watch the news or hop online or just pay attention to the lives of those around us. God is perfect.
He's only good. And because he's perfect, holy is the word. He can't be in the presence of sin. And as we've established, we've all sinned at some point. We've all chosen ourselves over Him.
We've all spat in the face of our Maker and severed our relationship with Him. As human beings, we brought death into the world. And when we gave the Earth's title deed to Satan, we gave ourselves to Him too. And that meant that when we die, when we reach the end of our earthly lives, the only thing waiting for us apart from God is death. We can't go to be with the Lord, because our sin makes that impossible.
The Bible tells us the wages of sin is death.
God created us perfect and holy so that we could have a relationship with Him. He put us in paradise and gave us a life of joy and peace that would have lasted forever. If you want to see what God's plans were. You need only open your Bible and read about Eden in the first few chapters of Genesis. That's what God gave us.
That's the start God gave us. That was God's design. All of this, all the pain and suffering that we see around us, that's us. That's our choice. That's what our hands have wrought.
That's what we built by tearing down what God had built. Jesus said of Satan a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy and we put that thief in charge of the earth. We chose to partner with him instead of God and that left us, humans and the Earth in a hopeless position. We had free will, for without it love cannot exist. We used that free will to reject God, thus severing our relationship with Him in a way that we could never fix.
In choosing to reject God and align with Satan, we rejected good in favor of evil. And in rejecting God, we ushered in a new age of brokenness resulting in pain, suffering, violence, and everything that comes along with evil. People have historically, and people still do today, react to this reality in three primary ways. Firstly, some choose to blame God, questioning how he could be good if we're experiencing all this pain and suffering. But this view expresses ultimately a desire that God do away with free will because you can't rid the world of evil without doing away with free will.
It's a desire that God would intervene and remove evil, which can only be done by loving our option to choose evil, which would end free will and the option of love and make the possibility of genuinely choosing to love God impossible. This view also ignores the reality that this is all our Paul, it's all our fault. So, the first response is to blame God and say, hey, I just want God to come in and do away with all the evil. But nobody thinks, yeah, but most of the people making that objection don't understand that if God did that, he'd have to do away with them because they're not serving God, they're not loving God. They're worshipping a different God.
The second response to all the pain and hurt in the world is some will claim there is no God, the universe is chaos, and this proves that there is no designer. But this view ignores the overwhelming amount of scientific, historical, and existential evidence to the contrary. And instead of concluding the obvious that the evil in our world proves that man is inherently evil, this perspective tries to claim that, well, there is no such thing as evil or good because if there is no God, there is no afterlife, and everything is essentially meaningless. And so this view refuses to take any kind of responsibility for the world that we have made, and it certainly offers no hope for anything better. So, people either blame God, people either deny the existence of God. But lastly, there have been, and there still are, those who are willing to recognize the truth instead of blaming God. They realize as they look at the world and themselves with honesty, that every bit of pain and suffering we experience is one more reminder that we have broken the universe and ourselves. And instead of being angry at God, or ignoring the problem, some choose to instead cry out, God, even though this is all our fault, please help us. Please help us.
Those who are honest enough, as I said, to look at themselves and the world around us and conclude that we are in a hopeless situation outside of the grace of God. Because if God doesn't do something, we're doomed. Things are not getting better, and I want to ask you to slow down for a minute and answer this question. When you encounter pain and suffering, which view do you take? Do you blame God?
Do you doubt God, or are you broken before God? If you're suffering in an area of your life right now, what's your perspective? If you're honest, do you blame God? Do you doubt God? Or are you broken before God?
Here's the incredible thing. It's unbelievable, in fact. God did do something. He has done something. And the something he did is the reason that all of us are here this evening talking about it.
While it's true that a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, Jesus went on right after that to contrast what he would do to what Satan has done, saying, But I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance. And even though Isaiah began by saying we all went astray like sheep, we all have turned to our own way, the very next thing he wrote was, and the Lord has punished him that's Jesus for the iniquity of us all. And while it's true that the wages of sin is death, that verse ends with, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Jesus came to the Earth as a man and fully experienced, fully immersed Himself in the broken world that we had wrecked. He came and dwelt in his perfect world that we had ruined.
And throughout his life, he experienced all the evil, pain, and suffering that we ushered into his creation when we rejected Him. And Jesus did the most incredible thing. He came as a substitute and took our place in relationship to our Heavenly Father. He lived a perfect life without ever sinning, which none of us could do, and that made Him the only one qualified to die in our place as an acceptable substitute. And then he suffered and died in our place, revealing what we deserved for our rejection of God.
He suffered more than any person has ever suffered, and he experienced the full weight of death. He experienced having his body broken in the most brutal way possible. And he experienced separation from his father in heaven. And when his body was laid in the tomb, he was there in our place. If he had stayed there, if death had been able to hold Him, death would still be able to hold us.
But the grave could not contain Jesus, because Jesus had never chosen to disobey His Heavenly Father. He had never given those rights over to Satan or to death. And so, when Jesus rose from the dead, it meant that our sins were paid for. The debt we owed God had been paid by Jesus on our behalf. And we too could experience this renewed relationship with God through faith in Jesus.
So, write this down Jesus lived, was judged, suffered, died, and rose again in our place. In our place. And when he did all that, Jesus restored to us the choice. This is the incredible part. He didn't take our free will away.
He did all of that so that we could have the choice once again to love Him or reject Him. He still doesn't force us to love Him because love requires free will. The question I want to ask you, after being reminded of all that Jesus has done for you, how Jesus responded to the mess we made, the question I want to ask you is do you believe that God is good? Do you believe that God is good? The answer is yes.
It has to be. Because if God had abandoned us, we would only be experiencing what we deserve and the eternity that we had earned by rejecting Him. God owed us nothing. Do you understand that? God owed us nothing.
Yet he gave us the most precious thing in existence. He gave himself the life Jesus lived. And the death he died means that there is nothing you will ever experience, no amount of pain or suffering that will be worse than what Jesus has personally experienced in a human body.
He knows what it is to suffer, and he's compassionate toward us, even though he had every right to just leave us in the mess we had made. He didn't. And he will never ask us to go through more than He Himself has gone through. And it doesn't stop there. If you've been through the Book of Revelation with us, then you know God has a plan for Jesus to return to the Earth one day and reign as king.
And when that day comes, Jesus will reset the Earth back to an Eden-like state, and he will rule over the Earth for a thousand years. And the whole point of that will be to silence any voice who would cry out, God is not good. We were set up to fail because we will all bear witness to what the Earth was like when God first gave it over to man. And nobody will be able to say, wow, if I had come from a different family, if I had had better parents, if society hadn't set me up to fail. Because we will see how perfect and beautiful it was when it was given to us.
And despite that, we used our free will to still reject God. I have no doubts that only then, when the earth is restored by Jesus, will we actually realize how much we lost when Adam and Eve and you and I rejected God in favor of ourselves. Jesus has the right to do all this because, through the Cross and the Resurrection, He paid for our sins. Then he conquered the power of sin and death. And when he did that, he took back the title deed to the earth.
It's in his possession right now. So, write this down. Jesus now holds the title deed to the earth. Jesus holds the title deed to the earth, but he hasn't cashed it in, so to speak. When he does, he will reign as King over the earth.
And when he does, when he lays claim to the earth, all those who have not chosen Him will be expelled from the earth. That's what's going to happen. So, if it's true that Jesus has the title deed to the earth, why doesn't he just do it right now? Well, because of what I just said. He's being patient.
The Bible says he wants to give people more time to use their free will to choose a relationship with Him so that they can be connected with Him in relationship and go into eternity, connected to the source of life and peace and love and everything good and be with Him. But make no mistake, the future is set. Jesus has already won. Satan is not inching closer to victory with time. Jesus is simply giving people on the Earth more time to be part of his family.
We know that free will must exist for love to exist. So, God's interventions in our world must not mess with free will in the broad sense. But I don't want to pretend we can understand why God sometimes intervenes and sometimes doesn't. When we struggle with that in our own lives, when we struggle with, well, why did he do something for that person? Why hasn't he done anything about my pain and suffering?
We have to go back to two truths. First, truth he did do something. He did do something for your pain and suffering. He died so that your pain and suffering would be a temporary situation and not your permanent state. He died so that the pain and suffering you experience in this life will be as bad as it ever gets.
Do you understand that? That if you belong to Jesus, this life is as bad as it will ever get for you? That's it. If you don't belong to Jesus, this is as good as it will ever be for you. But in eternity, for those who belong to Jesus, all of our suffering and pain will be forgotten.
And it will disappear from view like an old home in the rearview mirror of a car as you drive away to a new destination.
Never forget that Jesus has done something about your pain and suffering. And one of the reasons we need to be in God's word need to fellowship with Him in prayer daily, worship Him, gather as the Church, fellowship with brothers and sisters in the faith is so that we never allow ourselves to believe the lie that God has not been active on our behalf. He died and rose again on our behalf. The second thing we need to remember is that God is good. God is good.
If he is God, his view must be bigger and better than ours. His thoughts must be higher than ours. His plan and perspective must be greater than our understanding. Otherwise, he would not be God. When I look at the world around me, and then I look at the cross, I can only conclude that I haven't seen it all.
But I've seen enough to know that God is good. And I've seen it a thousand times over. He's good. Why is there pain and suffering in the world?
Because we rejected God and brought it into the world. Why doesn't God end all our pain and suffering right now? Because he wants others to have the chance to choose to love Him. And that can't happen unless there's free will. And unless he delays coming back to reign over the Earth.
He's also doing something bigger than we can imagine. And what is truly best for us, individually and collectively, will only be truly understood when we arrive in his presence. And where there are gaps in our understanding, we choose to look at the cross and confess, I haven't seen it all, but I've seen enough to know that my God is good. And so if you're struggling with pain, if you are suffering, I want to encourage you to especially bring that to the Lord today as we worship in just a couple of minutes and realize that all the pain and suffering we experience is only because we invited sin into our world. But instead of leaving us in that place, god interrupted our hopelessness, suffered in our place, died in our place, and rose again in our place.
And he secured for those who choose to love Him a future free of pain and suffering, filled with better things than Eden ever saw. And I hope you'll take a moment to just thank the Lord for his goodness. If you've forgotten that if you've forgotten that the Lord is good, let Him know that you're sorry for being slow to remember, because he's only ever good. I'll ask the worship team to come up. In John chapter 14, Jesus said to his disciples, don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I'm going to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself so that where I am, you may be also. You know the way to where I'm going.
And then Jesus said this - I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever. He is the spirit of truth. The world is unable to receive Him because it doesn't see Him or know Him. But you do know Him because he remains with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans.
I am coming to you. In a little while, the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live too. And on that day, you will know that I am in my Father, you are in me and I am in you. Because Jesus lives, we live, too.
Because Jesus reigns in eternity, we will too. In the biggest, deepest, most hopeless mess we could ever make, Jesus showed up and said, put it on me. Put it all on me. And then he paid for it with his life.
We're never alone. We're never alone if we belong to Him. And he is always good. Always. Always.
And so where we can't understand the why right now, we fill in those gaps in our knowledge with what we do know, that he's good. He's good only ever and always. Let's pray. Would you bow your head and close your eyes, Father, we want to pray right now for any of our brothers and sisters who are here, who are going through pain or suffering. Lord, we love them, and we know that you love them infinitely more.
We pray, first of all, that they would be comforted by your spirit. That however deeply entrenched the pain is, even if it's turned into bitterness and anger, that you would break through it right now in the name of Jews, as the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the counselor, and that they would be overwhelmed by your kindness, by your mercy and our grace, by what you did for them and by the way you are with them right now. And so, we pray, Lord, that you would touch them right now in a way that is real, that is tangible, that fills up the parts of their soul that they didn't even realize were empty. With your spirit and with your peace. Jesus.
I pray for anyone carrying burdens as well. That you will enable us by your spirit to cast them at your feet, to let them go and to be filled with what your word says is the peace that goes beyond understanding. A peace that is in no way connected to our circumstances, that comes from above, that is divine, that is transcendent.
And Lord Jesus, above all else, we want to say thank you. Thank you. For not leaving us in the mess that we made. You owed us nothing. We had no rights to claim anything from you, no rights to accuse you of anything.
And had you chosen to walk away and leave us to our fate, who could call that unjust? No one. But, Lord, we are so thankful that because love is who you are, you could not simply walk away. It's not who you are. And so, you came and you interrupted our mess at the highest cost possible and loved us with our body and Your blood.
And we love you for that. And we are so thankful for that. And so, Jesus, we want to use the choice that you have restored to us to serve you, to love you, to worship you, to obey you, to offer our lives to you. And so, Jesus, we pray that you would reign as Lord over us. And whatever that looks like in our lives right now, we invite you to do it.
Whatever you want to do in us, we invite you to do it. Because we belong to you. And we are so glad we do. We love you Jesus. And we can't wait for the day when all things are made right, because the thing we want more than anything else is not bad stuff to end.
But we can't wait for the day when the universe is rightly reoriented around you, and when all fame and all glory returns to its rightful terminus at your feet. And then everything is in balance. And then everything is shalom with you at the center, you on the throne. We long for that day. And we pray until it comes that it would be as much like that as possible in our lives, individually, in our marriages, in our families, and in our church.
Jesus, we love you. We bless you. May you be honored above all things. It's in Your name we pray. Amen.