The passage this message was preached from, in full, with every other passage it reached for.
Luke 13:1-5key text read aloud and expounded upon, Jesus addressing whether those who suffered deserved it more than others
1 Now there were some present at the same time who told him about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.
2 Jesus answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered such things?
3 I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.
4 Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them; do you think that they were worse offenders than all the men who dwell in Jerusalem?
5 I tell you, no, but, unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.”
God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous
45 that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.
God presents Job to Satan as blameless and upright, used to show suffering is not necessarily caused by personal sin
8 Yahweh said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil.”
Jesus as high priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses, having been tempted in all things
15 For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.
John makes clear the answer to the problem of evil and suffering is love
1 Beloved, don’t believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God,
3 and every spirit who doesn’t confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of the Antichrist, of whom you have heard that it comes. Now it is in the world already.
4 You are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.
5 They are of the world. Therefore they speak of the world, and the world hears them.
6 We are of God. He who knows God listens to us. He who is not of God doesn’t listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God.
8 He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love.
9 By this God’s love was revealed in us, that God has sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another.
12 No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God remains in us, and his love has been perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we remain in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as the Savior of the world.
15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him, and he in God.
16 We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.
17 In this love has been made perfect among us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, even so are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment. He who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love him, because he first loved us.
20 If a man says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?
21 This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should also love his brother.
Jesus returning as a lion to rule with an iron scepter and tread the winepress of God's wrath
15 Out of his mouth proceeds a sharp, double-edged sword, that with it he should strike the nations. He will rule them with an iron rod. He treads the wine press of the fierceness of the wrath of God, the Almighty.
The message in order, in a few minutes of reading.
Brad Yates brought this message in the wake of his mother's passing three weeks before, and he framed it as the first of two Sundays on the problem of suffering. He argued that Christians are uniquely equipped to answer the world's hardest questions about evil and pain, and that understanding the Christian view in calm moments is the only way to be ready when suffering arrives.
What was said
Brad opened by noting that suffering, or the fear of it, is probably the main reason most people never turn to God. He said the church has to be willing to sit with the hard questions honestly, without flinching from the hard truths, because ignoring a problem does not make it go away. He pointed to the passage in Luke 13 where Jesus is asked about the Galileans killed by Pilate and the eighteen crushed by the tower in Siloam. Jesus' answer cuts through the instinct to find someone to blame. The people who died were not worse sinners than anyone else. We are all offenders, and the call to repent is for everyone in the room, not just the unlucky ones who happened to be standing under the tower.
Brad then walked through three competing views of suffering that shape how people respond to pain. The secular Western, or Epicurean, view treats suffering as the enemy to be eliminated at all costs. He traced this logic through rising opioid and antidepressant use, through social media and Netflix as escape hatches, and through what he called Aldous Huxley's nearly prophetic picture of a society sedated into compliance in Brave New World. The problem, he said, is that medicating or ignoring suffering does not resolve it. It just delays the reckoning.
The second view is the Stoic and Eastern one, which Brad said is gaining ground precisely because the Epicurean approach so obviously fails. Philosophies like Stoicism and Buddhism get one thing right, that we are not in control. But they overcorrect by counseling people never to hope too much, to accept whatever comes as neither good nor bad and simply move on. Brad set that against the plain witness of the Gospels. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus even knowing he was about to raise him. He was not stoic in life, not in the garden, and not on the cross, and he did not call his followers to be stoic either.
The Christian view, which Brad called his thesis for the day, holds three things together. Suffering is a grievous reality. It exists because of sin, not necessarily because of your sin, which is the precise point Jesus was making in Luke 13 and the precise point the whole book of Job makes. And God is with us in the suffering. Brad said a phrase shared by a friend at his mother's funeral has stayed with him: death and suffering are normal, but they are not natural. They were never part of God's original design, and the fact that every funeral still feels wrong is evidence that we know this deep down.
Brad then pressed into the harder question of how God can be both all-good and all-powerful while evil continues. He was careful to say that God is not the author of evil, but that God is still sovereign over it, and that our finite minds cannot fully account for what God is doing at any given moment. He quoted John Piper's line that God is doing ten thousand things in your life at once, and you might notice three of them. He also noted that in Scripture, God rarely begins to use someone in a significant way until they have suffered first, running through a long list of biblical figures from Abraham to Paul to make the point.
He closed by circling back to the question of why God does not simply remove all evil now, and said the answer is love. If God eliminated all evil today, he would have to start with us, because evil is so tangled into the human heart. Instead, God is patient. For those in Christ, there will be a day with no more pain, no more death, no more loss. But that day is not yet here, and in the meantime, the most important thing Brad said he wanted people to carry out is this: Jesus experienced everything we experience, he overcame it, and he has promised to be with us always.
Doing a Bible study?
Here is a guide we have prepared for you: the passages
in order, questions for the group, and room to write.
Brad described three views of suffering: secular Western, stoic Eastern, and Christian. Which of these views have you caught yourself leaning on when hard times hit, and what drew you to it?
Brad said that stress can be a check engine light for our hearts, and that the safe answer is not to ignore it but to bring it to a trusted friend or to God in prayer. What makes that hard to actually do, and what has helped you do it?
Alright. Good morning, everybody. How are we? I'm glad to see you, and I'm glad to be here to worship together. Would you stand with us, and we will sing.
I'll fly away together. I sense a theme here. I'll fly away when we all get to heaven, and I pray for a moment. Lord, we thank you for life abundant. As we sing these songs, I I continue to thank God.
Thank you for being the good shepherd and offering an us an abundant life here and an abundant life in eternity without any sorrow or pain or tears. Thank you, Lord. Thanks for the promise of eternity, but thank you, God, for your presence with us right now. Amen. Amen.
You sound so good this morning. And Nick is gonna share some announcements. You can have a seat for a moment.
Good morning, everybody. Don't there's a voice that sound so angelic this morning? So good. We've some morning announcements. So glad to have you all here.
Jeff's gonna advance that slide. First BBQ between services certain weeks. August 18, for example, we'll have the barbecue outside. Come early, invite your friends, and a church camp out is also gonna be August twenty third through twenty fifth. If you don't wanna sleep down there at the Palisades, feel free to just come down for the day and hang out with us and then come on back home if you'd like to.
If you have questions, let me know or the Macuis. We don't have any third through fifth grade Sunday school during the summer. They'll be back, but everybody else is meeting, including Jeff's got the slide for middle school and high school. He's still meeting in the library. And by the way, we have a library.
Some people don't know that. So if you need a book, stop down there. And we'll go back to the Old Bills slide. Old Bills giving season is opening up on August 9. And you probably know, but the community foundation here in Jackson hosts a huge race where thousands of people race down the streets, and they use that to raise funds for a bunch of nonprofits in town.
And the First Be Benevolence Fund is one of those. We use that money almost every day to help people here in Jackson that are struggling with gas, with emergency housing, to get them out of town. Right now, we're helping somebody house their cat in an emergency situation. So it's it's amazing how often we need it, and the the need is growing much faster. And a lot of the community organizations are helping people less and less and less in specializing.
So we try to say yes. Your donors donations are multiplied through that. They're not quite matched, but it's close. And so on August 9, we should have a link on our website. You can go through that and give to First Bee through Old Bills, but that link won't be there till the ninth.
So if you have any questions, let me know. And we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we use that money too. Crossroads, the Gateway the church is holding a big youth conference this Friday and Saturday from six to 09:30. So if you all know anybody in that age range, send them that way. Lots of great food and a great place to participate.
Jeff got another oh, Women of Legacy luncheon is coming up August 26. There's more information on a bulletin outside on the the bulletin board there. And the turpents are are part of the group that's putting that together. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. And also, there are church wide emails.
There's two different kinds. There's one where five days a week, you can get on a a Bible reading plan and they'll send you some Bible verses and a description of that. And they're looking for more people to write if anybody's interested. It's free. You can sign up on our website for that and it's a great way to connect and learn about your neighbors.
And then secondly, we have a weekly bulletin email that goes out with all of the highlights and the prayer requests too. You can sign up for those on our website. And if you need help with any of that, let me know. We'd love to have you guys participate. And then finally, why don't you stand up and greet each other?
I'm sorry I talked so fast. Feel free to process that. Ask your neighbor what I said, and that's fine. And why don't you greet each other, and then we'll come back to song.
Thanks, Nat. Appreciate it. Good job. And the greatest thing, number six forty four. You can have a seat here for a moment.
This is the worship through giving part of the service. I'll invite the ushers to come on forward, and I'm gonna ask Steve Baldock. He's gonna do both. Both pray
and serve. And
you know how good guys are at multitasking. Right? I thought I'd just take a second too. You know, the elders, we've been talking about the fact that in today's world, a lot of you are giving on Venmo and cross chat and blah blah blah blah blah. So don't feel bad if that plate goes by you.
You know what I mean? Take the pressure right off of you there. Okay. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we came here to worship you today.
What this world, you know, strives to get, we freely put in this plate. And we'd ask that you would bless this gift and the giver cause we praise you for who you are. You're the son of the living God and there is no other. Amen.
Thank you, Judy. That is one of my favorite pieces that you play. Can we just thank her one more time? I love her. And Bob, why don't you come on up?
This morning, Bob Wales is gonna to read the scripture for us, and then one of our elders, Brad Yates, will expound on the scripture. But before you read, Bob, may I just pray? And and, God, we ask for your blessing here in the reading of the word, but also that we would take it to heart, absorb it, that we could understand it. Holy Spirit, would you illumine the word this morning? Holy Spirit, would you give us, comfort?
And, also, would you spur us on, to do something with what we hear today? In Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank
you, I appreciate Brad leaving the, scripture up here for us. It's in bigger print, which I need desperately. So this is an interesting set of scripture here in that it Jesus is teaching us about the seminal issue with every human being that will ever exist in this reality. Now on that very occasion, there were some some present who reported to him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus responded and said to them, do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans just because they have suffered this fate?
No. I tell you. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you think that those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse offenders than all the other people who live in Jerusalem? No.
I tell you. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Thanks, Bob. Good morning. As many of you guys may know, my mom passed away three weeks ago. Aw. And thank you.
And I can't thank this church enough for the love and support that they've shown my family and I in that time. In processing all this though, it felt important to articulate why it is that we as Christians grieve, but not as those without hope. Because while grieving and suffering are different, they're closely enough aligned that it felt worth addressing the Christian answer to the problem of suffering. In the thirty minutes or so that I'll speak to you today, something like 300 children under the 15 worldwide will die. Thirty five children here in The US will be subject to abuse.
Even with the recent changes in federal abortion laws, some 40 abortions will be performed in The US, all while I'm speaking to you today. We don't like to think about how dark the world is. It's unpleasant. In our culture of unbridled individualism, happiness is everything. And yet on occasion, the darkness forces its way into our conscious, either through collective national tragedies like a school shooting or nine eleven or natural disaster or through the death and sickness of a loved one.
Church, we have to be able to answer the hard questions that the world has without ignoring the hard truths that exist while placing our hope in the greatest truth that exists. Because my guess is that suffering or the lack thereof is the main reason why most people don't turn to God. They're either mad at some imaginary construct of their own design that has nothing to do with the God of the Bible. Then after that for our good, then can it all make more sense. But a life centered on yourself or on any other mortal human being will ultimately break down, and you'll be left with only questions and no answers.
The other way this breaks down is that people tend to insulate themselves from any suffering or hardship through materiality. The problem, though, is that even when you ignore a problem, it doesn't make it go away Because the problem remains, one day something will ruin your life. In light of eternity, it can actually be a kindness of God to shake the foundations of our comfortable life, to wake us up from the slumber of materiality. So with that in mind, we're gonna spend the next two Sundays together looking at the problem of suffering. Not because we want to or because it's fun to talk about, but as participants in a fallen world, we have to.
We as Christians, we have the only coherent answer to the problems that the world has around the questions of evil and suffering. And it's not just the world that requires our discussion of it, but the Bible as well. There are entire books in the Old and New Testament that deal with the core problem of suffering. It's a core function of the human condition to address this. So we're gonna spend our time today looking at the problem of suffering from a more academic perspective, the 30,000 foot view.
Next week, we'll get a little bit more practical, and we'll talk about what to do when you or somebody you love is suffering more acutely. Said another way, this week, we're going to deal with the global problem of suffering, and next week, we're going to teach about the local problem of suffering. Now many of us in this room, I know personally, are dealing with issues right now. The Bible calls us to come alongside them, to love them, to bear one another's burdens. And if it's not you currently, it will be one day.
So we get ready now either to be a help or to be helped. Because when you are in crisis, that is not the best time to prepare. We all intuitively know that to be true around natural disasters and physical calamities, but it's also true emotionally and spiritually. We cannot treat pain and loss as a philosophical issue when we're in the midst of suffering. In fact, to speak to somebody that way can be unintentionally cruel.
And if if that's what I'm doing to your heart today in bringing this up, please forgive me. It is not my intent. Now I'd be remiss if I went any further in this talk without mentioning that the two books were particularly helpful in me putting together this talk in next week. These guys influence my conversations every time I come to you, but it was particularly acute this time. So it's Tim Keller's walking with God through pain and suffering and John Piper suffering and the sovereignty of God.
Okay. So that's background. For our key text for today, we're gonna look at Luke thirteen four. Or do you think that those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed were worse offenders than all the other people who live in Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
So for context for our scripture today, we're in the middle of Luke's gospel and in the midst of Jesus' earthly ministry. He's teaching. He's healing. He's making proclamations about the kingdom of God. And somebody comes to him, shares the news, asks this question about the sacrilegious evil that Pontius Pilate, that same guy, has committed against some of the Jews.
Now we don't know if Jesus is being baited with this question as he is elsewhere, but he takes the opportunity here to rather than just directly answer the question asked, he uses the interest in it to tell the broader story of what God is doing. And for that, he directs our attention away from the moral evil committed by Pilate to something that would be considered more just general bad luck. Because first century Israel was in many ways similar to our culture today from this standpoint. And that people generally assume that if you were living right, things kind of worked out better for you. And Jesus is addressing this head on.
Siloam is a neighborhood in Jerusalem near the famous Pool Of Siloam that's still existing, and you can go see it today. But they were building this tower, and the tower collapsed, and it killed some otherwise seemingly innocent bystanders. In those days, this sort of thing would have made proverbial front page headlines. Everybody would have known about it. But were these people who died, were they worse offenders than all the rest?
Did they deserve this fate more than the rest? Jesus makes it clear that they weren't. But in his usual brilliance, he frames the answer not in a way of good versus bad. No. We're all bad.
We're all in need of a savior, or else Christ need not come and die for our sins. No. Jesus says, were these people worse offenders? The clear implication is that we are all offenders. And the rhetorical answer, of course, is that they were not any worse than the rest of us.
He then extends that same idea to everyone. And he says, no, I tell you, but unless you repent, will all likewise perish. What Jesus is saying there is that unless you recognize the sin that's in your own life, you cannot and will not come into a saving faith in Jesus. It's a work of the Holy Spirit to do that. We have to both turn away from our sin and our temptations and turn towards our savior.
The other clear takeaway from Jesus' teaching here is that circumstances and suffering are not necessarily the fault of you or anybody around you. Moral evil, like what's described with Pilate doing here, that's easier to ascribe cause to. But Jesus is introducing us to this idea of natural evil, and that's harder. And I'll confess, I've had this thought before where I've had the little voice in my head say, after a really bad day of work or maybe my kids are sick or something like that. I've had that little voice say, wonder if it's because I didn't have a good quiet time or because of that harsh word that I said.
It's not. And Ray calls that old time religion. The idea that we can be good enough that somehow God owes us a life of comfort and prosperity. And it's a false gospel. We don't normally call it that in our minds, but that's what it is.
In in Matthew five, Jesus summarizes this idea when he says that God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. The idea is that in common grace, believers and and unbelievers, they don't have necessarily different levels of luck or prosperity. In an agrarian society, sun and rain coming in equal amounts or in the right amounts was a common grace. It was a blessing from God.
It's a kindness for him. So that's our context for today from Luke 13. But we're gonna do things a little differently today because rather than me usually grabbing the key points straight out of the text, we're gonna look more broadly at the Bible as a whole, at Christian philosophy, and at the world around us. So for cultural context, we're gonna focus on three predominant views of suffering that exist in the world. And the reason why we're doing this is because you or everyone you know basically subscribes to one of these three views, whether or not they know the labels.
And these three views are secular Western, stoic Eastern, and Christian, and they are in opposition to each other. So for our first one, secular Western. This is in the Bible, it's also called Epicurean or as a Greek philosophy. And our culture at large today is without exception, the most suffering avoidant of all time. Logically, this actually makes some sense.
Because if all we are is a ball of chemicals or cosmic dust, if there is no defined eternity, if we do not have a creator, then it actually makes sense to do everything you can to get all of the pleasure you can get and none of the pain. Our core essence as humans, it would hold, is to be little pleasure factories. The problem, though, is that this is too shortsighted even for the most avowed atheist. It's akin to eating nothing but sugar because that's what tastes best in the moment. It's obvious that's not how we function.
And this avoidance of meaning or of anything difficult has resulted in some really unique cultural phenomenon. You look at the skyrocketing use of opioids, of antidepressants, of antianxiety meds. And I'm not saying that there's no use for this, to be clear. But what I'm saying is as a larger and larger percentage of our population becomes addicted or dependent upon these medications and to no discernible improvement in statistical outcomes, it's at least alarming. Or from a more structural level, if suffering has no point, then it makes sense to work hard to eliminate all suffering or at least the perception of it to zero.
And yet addiction, depression, anxiety, and deaths of despair are all functions of our desperate need to avoid or minimize suffering, and it's not working. This is also true individually, just for the day to day malaise of human life. Social media and Netflix have made a fortune off of monetizing our need to just check out for a bit. We're very quickly losing the ability to have genuine human interaction rather than sit with the stress of a hard day or hold in the stress of a tough time in a relationship. Instead, we come home, we turn on Netflix, we pull up social media, and we seek solace in alcohol, in food, or in drugs.
We're terrified of having honest reflections or conversations not just with strangers, but with friends and perhaps most of all with ourselves. If you want to know the most accurate, in my opinion, the most accurate view of dystopia in fiction, it's not Hunger Games or Fahrenheit four fifty one or Mad Max as exciting as that might be or even 1984. But it's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written all the way back in 1932 by an atheist about the logical conclusions of a materialist society. In the book, the currency of the world is a drug called soma that increases happiness and complacency as instant gratification. So instead of being controlled by autocrats or by armies, the populace is instead soothed into submission by a united effort, by the government, by corporations, and by the media.
Not that we could ever imagine such a thing. But there's no need in the book to form relationships or to have difficult conversations when you can just pop a pill and turn on TV. And I think Huxley nailed it nearly a century ago, and he didn't even believe in Satan. As thoughtful Christians, we should consider what you're teaching your brain when we do these conflict avoidant behaviors. We're saying don't deal with problems or stresses.
Ignore them. Medicate them with that extra glass of wine or with that funny meme that you found on social media. But the issue is when we ignore problems or mistreat them, it doesn't make them better. And we all know that. If you've ever ignored a check engine light or a low fuel warning or if like my wife, you see him as a threat.
But stress can be a check engine light for our hearts. Maybe it is just a tough season at work or maybe it is a tough season in a relationship. Maybe we do just need to grit our teeth and get through it. Or maybe it's an indication that we have some soul work that we need to do. In either case, the safe answer, the logical answer is not to ignore it, but is instead to have a conversation with a trusted friend or a brother or sister in Christ.
To bring it to God in prayer. In any case, the logical conclusion is not to ignore it. Western culture is also fixated on addressing all potential causes of suffering socially as pragmatic, and therefore, there should be a solution for it. This is why every politician is expected to have a policy view on everything. The problem of crime is always to be solved either by more policing or more education or sympathy, and it's not a left or a right problem as Jesus sees it.
The core issue is not either of those but sin. So while pragmatic solutions are good and should be pursued, we have to remember that we as Christians, we're not called to create societies. We're called to create disciples. We as Christians, we are to seek justice and love mercy and should work for the improvement of outcomes for everybody in society because the Bible makes very clear that everybody you run into all day is made in the image of God and therefore worthy of value, dignity, and worth. Helping people in poverty or addiction or injustice is right and is good, but we must also care for their souls and tell them about Jesus.
We as Christians are called to be a balm of healing in both aspects, both physical or practical and spiritual. And to neglect either is falling short and is ignoring reality, which is a good way to sum up the Epicurean approach. It is to ignore reality. Now in response to the obvious philosophical shortcomings of the secular Western approach, we've seen of late a rebirth of the interest in Eastern and Stoic philosophies. But they're all different in background.
At the end of the day, they're basically same in approach. So that's whether you're thinking about Buddhism or about Stoicism. The summation of these approaches is that suffering is up to fate. It's already been decided. They don't deal with why, who decided it.
But what they say is that we can only control our response. And the way to deal with suffering best is basically not to get our hopes up. Or when there is suffering or injury or death or even disappointment in life, that we should just accept it, not as good or as evil, but just as is, and then kind of move on. And yet all of these philosophies are in a way partially right, but they're very incomplete. Similar to how secular humanism does have a right focus on justice.
Stoicism and Eastern philosophy do have a right tendency to accept that we are not in control. The problem here is that it goes too far and proclaims that we should spare ourselves the illusion of suffering by never really getting our hopes up to begin with. And this is a common thread through Marcus Aurelius, through Seneca, through Epictetus, through Buddhism. Again, this approach is in direct contradiction with how God has obviously created us. And I think we all know this intrinsically.
God is love. That's a saying that gets misconstrued and warped these days. But what we're saying when we say that is that God's if you wanna know about God's essence, first and foremost, it is love. If you want to see how that was perfectly exemplified in man, we look to Jesus. And Jesus, guys, was passionate.
For example, who knows the shortest verse in the Bible? Easiest memory verse. John eleven thirty five. You guys say you can't memorize scripture. You just did it.
But the point is that Jesus wept. And we can keep in mind that in context, his friend Lazarus has just died, and Jesus is the only one present that knows that he's gonna bring Lazarus back from the dead, and yet Jesus wept. We don't know why he wept. We don't know if he was weeping at the brokenness of the world that's not made right. Was he weeping at what he knew it would cost him to bring his friend back to life?
Or was he weeping that his friend had experienced pain and loss and death? But the clear takeaway is that Jesus wept. He experienced deep sadness. And in some translations, anger says he was bellowing with anger at the injustice of death. The point is Jesus was not stoic, not in mission, not in life, and certainly not in the garden, and certainly not on the cross.
And he didn't call us to be either. Read your Bible. Crack open any of the Psalms. Shoot. There's an entire book in the Old Testament that we don't like to read called Lamentations.
Read the epistles. Read the hope and the joy and the sorrow that just bleeds from it. Psalm 42 is one of my favorites. It's a beautiful Psalm where the author allows himself to speak his grief and to acknowledge that God feels far away, but he ultimately reminds himself that God is his hope and God is his help. And that feels like a good segue to the Christian view of suffering.
So we've looked at a couple of the two anti Christian philosophies. This is the my thesis for today, the Christian view of suffering. That as Christians, we recognize that the world has fallen because of sin and that suffering is a reality that is both grievous as well as a tool that God uses for our refinement and that God is always with us in the suffering. My prayer leading up to this talk has been that God would give you one or two things that would just stick in your memory file, that you would remember when it's needed, and that you would make your hearts up right now about the Christian response to suffering so that when you're in it, you already know the direction that your heart need go. Our quick points that we're gonna look at today come from that thesis.
And it's that suffering is a grievous reality. Suffering exists because of sin. And third, that God is with us in the suffering. So suffering is a grievous reality. This is a quick point that basically summarizes what we've discussed so far.
This is a contrast with either the Epicurean view or the stoic one. Suffering is real. We can and should work to mitigate suffering through justice, but it cannot be eliminated. And it should grieve us that suffering exists both as a concept and when it becomes real and acute to the to us or those around us. And we're gonna walk through what that looks like as application next week.
That's the setup for our chat next week. But for now, we recognize that there is suffering and it exists not because of God, though, but because of sin. I was talking with Michael Worth, who some of you guys might know, around my mom's funeral. And he made the point to me that death and suffering are normal, but they're not natural. So that's been a phrase that's been really helpful to me, and so I'm bringing it to you.
It's the idea to make catchy how we should think about suffering, that it's normal, but it's not natural. Suffering was not in God's original design. We internally know this to be true that death is not natural. This is why no funeral feels right. If you guys may remember from High School English, the poem by Dylan Thomas, that we do not go gentle into that good night, that old age should rave and burn at close of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. You guys remember that one? It's been a while for some of you. But even dying dying peacefully in your sleep at ripe old age is not part of the original design. We say nicer things when that's what happens, but we still know that it's not right.
The idea is that God's original design for us was not suffering and death. Work, yes, but suffering, no. Suffering exists in the world because of sin. But let me be very clear here because Christ was in our key text. It is not necessarily because of your sin.
That's the point that Jesus made in our key text. Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners just because they suffered this fate? The clear answer is no. And if that's not enough for you, there's an entire book in the Old Testament that deals with this, and that's the book of Job. In Job one eight, the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job?
There is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. Guys, the the the reason that Job suffers is because Satan contends with God. Satan contends with God. That's why Job suffers. In fact, the reason that Satan causes so much destruction in Job's life is because God presents Job as the epitome of human righteousness.
Job suffered not because of his sin, but because of his righteousness. Now that's not a blueprint for us. We don't seek asceticism, but it's a counterexample to what we so commonly think. The other clear takeaway from Job and from all of scripture is that while God is not the instrument of evil and suffering, he is still sovereign over it. He still allows it.
And now this is where things get tricky. So I've I've lost you because of the heat. Let's focus back in. Because God cannot do evil. It would be against his nature.
And the only thing God can't do is something that is contrary to his very nature. And yet he's still sovereign over it. If you if you wanna dive into this philosophically, if you find that strain of thought interesting, you can look into what's called compatibilism, as in it's compatible. Because it's not up to us to try and explain suffering in a way that makes sense to our finite minds. If you want an interesting philosophical topic on that, that's called a theodicy.
And that's basically a human attempt to explain why God allows what he does. But all theodicies come up short because we are finite and God is not. In plain English, what that really means to you and me is that just because we can't see the reason for something doesn't mean there isn't one. There's an entire philosophical discussion to be had here. But I'm trying to summarize it when I say that God can be working things in your life that you can't even fathom.
And I know that can be cold comfort in times. But we've gotten we've not yet gotten to the best part. I'm just trying to show you that at some point, are going to have to have to actively choose in the midst of suffering to trust God. John Piper has this great quote about how at any given time, God is doing 10,000 things in your life. And if you are lucky, you might notice three of them.
And I think it's a good perspective because he may be course correcting you away from a sin struggle or from a a destructive pattern of past or future behavior like he did with Jonah. Or he may be preparing you to be truly useful for the kingdom of God. In fact, more often than not in the Bible, God does not really begin to use someone until they've suffered. Think of any of the heroes in the Bible, Old Testament or new. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Paul, Peter, John, James.
Not one of these men went without suffering, and God used all of them spectacularly. I just listed off the vast majority of the human authors of scripture, and God used them, but only after suffering. Here's another good way to think of it, and this is a quote from Tim Keller. I don't have it on the screen, but is the highest good that we be comfortable and without trouble or that we become spiritually and morally great? Now it's Tim Keller, so I'll say it twice because it's better than Brad.
Is the highest good that we'd be comfortable and without trouble or that we become spiritually and morally great? From a physical perspective, Nietzsche was obviously being too simplistic when he said, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Nietzsche, ironically, only believed in the physical realm. So if you apply that physically, if somebody is paralyzed, that doesn't increase their physical capacity. And yet the irony, of course, is that what Nietzsche said was true spiritually.
If you don't know the story of Johnny Eriksson Tada, I would really encourage you to look into it. You'll butcher the spelling, but Google will fix it. It'll be fine. But her story, her hope, and her ministry is a great example of how God can use suffering to sharpen somebody and to encourage others. Because if God had not allowed her to become paralyzed from the shoulders down when she was an otherwise healthy, popular, and athletic 17 year old girl, I would never have known about her.
And more importantly, her story would never have encouraged the thousands that have come to know God through her ministry. All without the use of her hands or her legs. We can think about our suffering similarly. It can be a tool to sharpen us and to be used to encourage others. But while God is not the author of evil, as I said, he does seemingly allow bad things to happen to us.
The amazing thing though is that he uses it in his wisdom ultimately for his glory and for our good if we would but widen our perspective. And while all of that's important, it would be really weak medicine without the key point of our talk today, which is that God is with us in the suffering. This is by far the most powerful and important thing that we will discuss today. It's the basis for our application next week. And there are two aspects for us to consider as we take this forward.
One is that whatever we experience, Jesus suffered too. And two, that he has promised to be with us always. So Jesus suffered. It says in Hebrews four fifteen, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things just as we are yet without sin. You can also look up first Peter two twenty three, which has become a memory verse for me about the perfect example of Christ.
When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. That's our savior, and that's our example. And this feels very Sunday school, but at the end of the day, this is what we need to remind each other of constantly.
It's the basics of the gospel and how to apply it. Because the gospel is not something that we ever outgrow. It's not something that you learn downstairs in Sunday school, but that we adults have grown beyond. The gospel message is the foundation for our lives as Christians. That Christ set aside equality with God, that he took on flesh, that he died for us, not because we were good people, but while we were still enemies of God.
And he did it because of love, and he did it gladly. And then he calls us to do the same. But we can also tend to forget that while Jesus is God, he was also fully man. Here's a list I put together of all the things that Jesus experienced. Starvation and thirst, death of friends, homelessness, anger, exhaustion, disappointment, rejection, distress, mockery, isolation, loneliness, and doubt.
Whatever you are experiencing, Jesus did too. And yet we don't get a lecture from God. He doesn't say to us, well, Jesus did it, so you should do it too. Instead, the God of the universe knows our weaknesses intimately now, and we draw encouragement from that. If you're drowning in the ocean, if you're out in a boat and you fall overboard or you get pulled out by a riptide and the coast guard finds you, they're on a boat or a helicopter, that good rescue swimmer, he's not going to stand there at the edge and explain to you how to swim.
He's not gonna tell you about his credentials. No. He gets in the water with you. And it's by his strength, it's by his power that you get through it. All you have to do is stop fighting him and trust in him.
That's the good rescue swimmer. But the problem is having that rescue swimmer, it doesn't make the cold water or the rough seas any more pleasant. No. It's still cold and it's still rough, but it does make them survivable. And suffering isn't diminished or any less real because of our savior, but it is bearable because he endures it with us.
He has gone through what we go through. And as our third point for today, he is with us, and he's promised to be with us always. This is Matthew twenty eight twenty from the great commission. Guys, Jesus will not abandon you. This is why Jesus said it would be better for him to go away, much to the confusion of his disciples.
It was so that we might receive the sealing of the Holy Spirit and yet also have Christ as our advocate seated at the right hand of the throne of God. So no matter what loss or pain or grief or experience we have, We rest in the fact that Jesus experienced it, the man of sorrows. That he overcame it and he is with us always. And that same God, he's always faithful. And what we mean when we say that is that God doesn't break his promises even when we fall short.
Now next week, we're gonna look together at how to put this into action, both for ourselves and for others. But we need to close by looking at the same question that I opened with, which is that how can God be all good and all powerful and there still be evil and suffering? And the answer is love. In first John four, the apostle John makes it clear that the answer is love. If the all good, all powerful God eliminated all evil right now, he might start with you or with me.
Because the root of evil is so intrinsically intertwined with our hearts that God can't remove evil. He'd have to destroy us. If you don't believe me, take the 10 commandments test. Take a sober look at how you stand up against God's standard for righteousness. Or if you wanna go New Testament, read Matthew five through seven in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus expounds even further on this.
Look at how you stack up against God's standard for righteousness instead of your own. If God got rid of all evil today, it would not go well for me. But I'm not yet complete, and neither are you. But I will be one day. It's just not gonna be here.
But God is patient, and he is loving. And for those of us that are in Christ, there will be a day where there will be no evil. There will be a day with no more pain or suffering or loss. We will rejoice together with friends and with loved ones that went home before us. And there will be only joy in Christ.
But that's when we go home or when he returns. Because things are not yet right here. Jesus came the first time not to get rid of evil, but to die for his bride, the church. He died so that we might live as it famously says in John three sixteen through 17. But that's not the end of the story because Jesus is coming back, and he's not coming back as a lamb.
He's not going to a cross again. He's coming back as a lion, as the only right king of the universe. In Revelation nineteen fifteen, he says, he will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. That's what it looks like for all things to be made right.
Then and only then will all things be made right. But until then, there will be suffering and death and evil, and you can count on it, and you can be ready for it. And in the meantime, we can trust in the patient and love of God. Now I'll invite Judy back up. I guess Carl can come too.
But I I I mentioned in the intro that mom passed away three years three weeks ago on July 10. That's gonna be a sad day on the calendar for me. But I realized in preparing for her eulogy that it doesn't have to be a sad day for me forever. Because July 10, two years ago, my mom stood on this very stage, and she gave her testimony to this church. And she was baptized right there, two years to the day before she passed away.
And so every year on July 10, I'll remember my sweet mom and her passing into eternity. But I'll also get to celebrate her public profession of faith and the fact that she went from not only being my mom, but being my sister in Christ. And God didn't owe me that. I'd prayed for it for a long time, but God didn't owe me that. But in his kindness, he provided.
If he had never done anything else for me, he would still be good and he would still be God. We know that because of the cross and the empty tomb. Church family, because of his patience and love, God does allow things to happen to us that might not make sense to us at the time. But he has the eternal perspective. He has the wisdom, and he loves us.
And we can trust in that because he did not spare his only and eternal son the same fate. So we can act on that knowledge today. We can go forward out of these doors here to live our lives of worship. And church, we can have a great week of worship. I'll see you guys next week.
Thank you, Brad.
And would you stand and join us? We'll we'll sing we'll we'll close here with Take My Life and Lead My Lead Me, Lord. May I pray here as you send us out? Lord, we pray just that. Would you when when we wanna make this our prayer and our and our song.
Here we are. Would you send us, Lord, Lord, even through the trials and and the storms, we know that you are with us. You are very, very present and here to lead us through. So, Lord, would you? In Jesus' name.
