Faith &Doubt (May 3,2009)
Faith and Doubt M3 2009 05 03
Title: If God Is Good, Why Is There Suffering?
Text: 1 Peter 1: 1-12
Big Idea: A redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Jack Welch, former chief executive at General Electric, grew up as a devoted Irish-Catholic. He was an altar boy, and later, as a young adult, he would travel more than an hour to attend mass.
His faith commitment changed, however, when his mother died of a heart attack. He said, "I felt cheated, angry, and mad at God for taking my mother away."
People can stop believing in God when they experience some kind of great loss. The loss of a parent, the loss of a partner through a break up, the loss of job, the loss of their health or when they witness the devastation or an earthquake or Swine Flu brings.
For many people, the biggest obstacle to faith in God is the suffering they see in the world. Philosophers have argued that the presence of suffering and evil in the world makes it impossible to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. The argument goes that if God is all-powerful he would be able to remove suffering, and if God were good he would want to remove suffering. But since there is suffering in the world, then God must either be all-powerful, but not good, or good and not all-powerful.
This argument, on the surface, seems to pose a great problem for a person who wants to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. But the argument rests on the presupposition that because we human beings cannot imagine a good reason as to why God might allow suffering or evil, therefore, there must not be any good reason for suffering and evil.
The scriptures do not definitively answer the question “how could a good and all-powerful God allow suffering.”
But the scriptures show us how God can redeem suffering and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
The Apostle Peter is writing to followers of Christ who are experiencing suffering, possibly under Emperor Nero, who according to the historian Tacitus burned Christians alive as torches to light his gardens at night and who, of course, is infamous for feeding Christians to wild animals in the coliseum as entertainment.
These people are no strangers to suffering.
If you have your Bibles, please turn to 1 Peter 1: 3-12:
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11 trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. 12 It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.
In verse 6 Peter says, “6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
Peter is saying that through suffering we can rejoice because through suffering our faith is refined like gold in a fire. In the economy of God, in ways that no human being can fully understand, God is able to take suffering, and bring a greater good out of suffering. The Scriptures teach us that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
God could, of course, have created a world where human beings were compelled to make only good choices (and therefore a world without evil and suffering).
But as some philosophers have pointed out, if that were the case, we would not really be making choices--we wouldn’t have freedom. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out in his classic book, The Problem of Pain, God could have created us so that it would be impossible for us to reject him. But he created us so that we could either freely love him, or reject him. If God forced us to love him, then we would lose our freedom and lose the value of a love that is freely given.
And God has given us the freedom, to do good, but also evil. If God created us with only the capacity to do good, then our freedom would be lost and so would the value of a good, freely done, be lost, as well.
If you are a parent, or if you become a parent one day, or responsible for a child, you will have some anxiety that your kid is going to screw up one day. You may have moments of anxiety because you are afraid that your child is going to be skipping out of class, smoking pot, getting into fights, making out with someone he or she hardly knows. We have the technology emerging through GPS where it will be soon very easy to track geographically wherever someone is through their cell phone. We have the cam technology that can enable us to monitor people 24 hours a day. But, if you had a child, if you had the option to do so, would you choose to use GPS technology and cam technology to constantly monitor your child? And if you could install a little chip into your child’s butt with the potential of transmitting an electric shock, so that every time he or she was tempted to do something wrong--to smoke pot, to cheat on an exam, would you use the chip in your child’s butt to register an electric shock?
You might be tempted to do so, but most of us, I am guessing, would choose not to have a Joey-cam, or a Joella-cam, because we intuitively know that if we forced someone to always do the right thing, not only would that person lose their freedom, which is a precious gift, but that person would also lose the capacity to experience the development of character that comes when a person freely chooses to do the good.
So it is with God, again in a mysterious way that we do not fully understand, God has given has given us the freedom to do good and evil, because, on the whole, this creates the greatest good, even though it also creates the possibility of evil and suffering in the world in small and large ways.
I am certainly not capable of explaining how a particular good is worked out in a particular life in a particular circumstance, but I can see how it is possible that a greater good is produced from a world where we have freedom, and even the freedom to do wrong and cause suffering.
Peter says in verses 6-7 that we rejoice in our suffering because now for a little while, we may suffer all kinds of trials, but these trials have come so that our faith-- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
So Peter argues that God can and will use suffering in us to refine us and to redeem us and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Suffering Peter says, has the potential (though this potential is not always realized) to create a space where we are refined like gold in the fire, and made better human beings.
Gerald Sittser, in his exquisite book, A Grace Disguised, describes how in an instant tragic car accident, he lost 3 generations of his family—his mother, his wife and his young daughter. And Gerald Sittser, who continued to believe in God through his great suffering and loss, says that he learned through his loss that tragedy can increase the soul’s capacity for darkness and light, for pleasure, as well as pain, for hope, as well as dejection. He says the soul is elastic like a balloon—it can grow larger through suffering
Loss can enlarge our capacity for anger, depression, despair and anguish, all natural and legitimate emotions whenever we experience loss. But once enlarged, the soul is also capable of experiencing greater joy, strength, peace and love.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, a philosopher who teaches at Yale, lost his adult son in a tragic
mountain climbing accident. In his book, The Lament for a Son, he wrote, “The value of suffering is the valley of soul-making.” Obviously, loss can make us less; but loss can also make us more.”
In 2 Cor. 4:17 Paul says, “For our light and momentary suffering will produce in us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all.”
When we suffer, and perhaps like Gerald Sittser and Nicholas Wolterstorff, you or your loved ones have suffered great loss, we typically don’t know, at least in the short run, why we have been allowed to experience this great suffering or loss, but we know that God can redeem suffering and that in the economy of God, a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Peter also points out that God redeems our suffering in the world to come. Peter says that, through Christ, God has given us a new birth: 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.
What Peter and the Scriptures teach us that one day, in part because of our suffering, we will receive an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. What Peter and the Scriptures teach us is that, if we belong to God, our suffering is never ultimately in vain.
The Scriptures do not teach that one day we will lose our individuality and become completely nothing, melding into the nothingness of the universe, but that one day we will return to a new Earth—a new Earth that is renewed and perfected.
Tim Keller says future life will not just be a consolation for the life we have never had, but a restoration of the things that we have always longed for.
This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired, but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.
Earlier in this series, I talked about how I had lost my wallet at a Vancouver Canucks game. If you have ever lost your wallet, you know the angst you can feel in the hours and the days that follow. Then when this young man returned it, I felt far more joy in my wallet (especially because it contained ID cards) than before I lost the wallet. I was very grateful.
As a young boy, I remember my mother dying… then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. I was so happy to see her, and so relieved--even though she got quite mad at me that day!
Since getting married, I have had a dream from time to time that my wife Sakiko has died. I am very, very sad and I wake up. I realize it was just a dream and I am so happy and grateful to see that she is alive.
In the movie Changeling which is based on a true story, in the late 1920s about 20 young boys are kidnapped and killed. David Clay—one of the boys assumed to have been killed by this kidnapper--about 7 years after being abuducted comes back to his parents. He says, I was afraid to come back earlier because I thought I might be threatened or my parents might be harmed. His parents are overcome with emotion and joy when they see him.
When we have lost something (or even just thought we lost something in a dream) and then get it back, we cherish what and appreciate it in far deeper way.
Because of the resurrection, because Jesus arose from the dead, it means that all of our losses will be restored and that the joy in experiencing what we have lost will be amplified for us because of the loss.
In the climax of The Lord of the Rings Sam discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead, as he thought for a while. He cries out, “I thought you dead, but then I thought I was dead myself!” He said, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” And the answer, according to Christ, is, yes, everything sad is going to come untrue, and will be greater for once having been broken and lost.
Dostoyevsky put it like this in the Brothers Karamazoz: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a painful mirage, like a despicable fabrication of an infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, and that in the world’s finale at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify all that has happened.”
As Augustine said: 'In my deepest wound I will see your glory and it will dazzle me!'
Julian of Norwich in her immortal words said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
The Christian faith does not answer the why of a particular suffering, but it tells us suffering will redeemed… and that a redeemed suffering is better no suffering at all…
The Christian faith’s answer to suffering is not an abstract answer, but a person.
When we look into the face of Jesus Christ, the one thing we cannot say is that God doesn’t love us.
In the face of Jesus Christ, see that God as a human being in Jesus voluntarily experienced the greatest depth of pain.
I have gone into a number of Buddhist temples in Japan and other Asian countries and have looked at the statues of Buddha, some of them large and very impressive. His legs are crossed, his arms are folded, his eyes are closed with a soft smile around his mouth, and a remote look on his face-- detached from sufferings of the world.
But in Christ we have a picture of God, who became a human being, allowed himself to be nailed to a cross, suffered on the cross, bearing in his body our sins and our shame, so that we could be forgiven of our sin and set free from it.
He of course experienced the great physical pain of being crucified, but also the immense emotional pain of being separated from God his Father. It’s painful when we break up with our partner, it’s painful when you lose a parent or spouse or child… but no loss was as great as Jesus losing the infinite love of God that he had enjoyed from all eternity. That is why he cried from the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
He also knew the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.
Jesus knows the physical pain of being whipped and nailed to the cross, searing emotional pain of losing something infinitely precious, the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.
Jesus is present to us in our physical pain, in our heart break, in the pain of our shame, and in all our losses.
He knows suffering first hand and is present with every person who has suffered whether in an Auschwitz concentration camp, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the genocide in Sudan, or right here in Vancouver.
Jesus doesn’t so much give us the answer to the why of our suffering, but he sits with us and weeps with us in our pain.
On the night he was betrayed, he showed how us how much he loved us.
He took bread…
Title: If God Is Good, Why Is There Suffering?
Text: 1 Peter 1: 1-12
Big Idea: A redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Jack Welch, former chief executive at General Electric, grew up as a devoted Irish-Catholic. He was an altar boy, and later, as a young adult, he would travel more than an hour to attend mass.
His faith commitment changed, however, when his mother died of a heart attack. He said, "I felt cheated, angry, and mad at God for taking my mother away."
People can stop believing in God when they experience some kind of great loss. The loss of a parent, the loss of a partner through a break up, the loss of job, the loss of their health or when they witness the devastation or an earthquake or Swine Flu brings.
For many people, the biggest obstacle to faith in God is the suffering they see in the world. Philosophers have argued that the presence of suffering and evil in the world makes it impossible to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. The argument goes that if God is all-powerful he would be able to remove suffering, and if God were good he would want to remove suffering. But since there is suffering in the world, then God must either be all-powerful, but not good, or good and not all-powerful.
This argument, on the surface, seems to pose a great problem for a person who wants to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. But the argument rests on the presupposition that because we human beings cannot imagine a good reason as to why God might allow suffering or evil, therefore, there must not be any good reason for suffering and evil.
The scriptures do not definitively answer the question “how could a good and all-powerful God allow suffering.”
But the scriptures show us how God can redeem suffering and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
The Apostle Peter is writing to followers of Christ who are experiencing suffering, possibly under Emperor Nero, who according to the historian Tacitus burned Christians alive as torches to light his gardens at night and who, of course, is infamous for feeding Christians to wild animals in the coliseum as entertainment.
These people are no strangers to suffering.
If you have your Bibles, please turn to 1 Peter 1: 3-12:
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11 trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. 12 It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.
In verse 6 Peter says, “6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
Peter is saying that through suffering we can rejoice because through suffering our faith is refined like gold in a fire. In the economy of God, in ways that no human being can fully understand, God is able to take suffering, and bring a greater good out of suffering. The Scriptures teach us that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
God could, of course, have created a world where human beings were compelled to make only good choices (and therefore a world without evil and suffering).
But as some philosophers have pointed out, if that were the case, we would not really be making choices--we wouldn’t have freedom. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out in his classic book, The Problem of Pain, God could have created us so that it would be impossible for us to reject him. But he created us so that we could either freely love him, or reject him. If God forced us to love him, then we would lose our freedom and lose the value of a love that is freely given.
And God has given us the freedom, to do good, but also evil. If God created us with only the capacity to do good, then our freedom would be lost and so would the value of a good, freely done, be lost, as well.
If you are a parent, or if you become a parent one day, or responsible for a child, you will have some anxiety that your kid is going to screw up one day. You may have moments of anxiety because you are afraid that your child is going to be skipping out of class, smoking pot, getting into fights, making out with someone he or she hardly knows. We have the technology emerging through GPS where it will be soon very easy to track geographically wherever someone is through their cell phone. We have the cam technology that can enable us to monitor people 24 hours a day. But, if you had a child, if you had the option to do so, would you choose to use GPS technology and cam technology to constantly monitor your child? And if you could install a little chip into your child’s butt with the potential of transmitting an electric shock, so that every time he or she was tempted to do something wrong--to smoke pot, to cheat on an exam, would you use the chip in your child’s butt to register an electric shock?
You might be tempted to do so, but most of us, I am guessing, would choose not to have a Joey-cam, or a Joella-cam, because we intuitively know that if we forced someone to always do the right thing, not only would that person lose their freedom, which is a precious gift, but that person would also lose the capacity to experience the development of character that comes when a person freely chooses to do the good.
So it is with God, again in a mysterious way that we do not fully understand, God has given has given us the freedom to do good and evil, because, on the whole, this creates the greatest good, even though it also creates the possibility of evil and suffering in the world in small and large ways.
I am certainly not capable of explaining how a particular good is worked out in a particular life in a particular circumstance, but I can see how it is possible that a greater good is produced from a world where we have freedom, and even the freedom to do wrong and cause suffering.
Peter says in verses 6-7 that we rejoice in our suffering because now for a little while, we may suffer all kinds of trials, but these trials have come so that our faith-- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
So Peter argues that God can and will use suffering in us to refine us and to redeem us and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Suffering Peter says, has the potential (though this potential is not always realized) to create a space where we are refined like gold in the fire, and made better human beings.
Gerald Sittser, in his exquisite book, A Grace Disguised, describes how in an instant tragic car accident, he lost 3 generations of his family—his mother, his wife and his young daughter. And Gerald Sittser, who continued to believe in God through his great suffering and loss, says that he learned through his loss that tragedy can increase the soul’s capacity for darkness and light, for pleasure, as well as pain, for hope, as well as dejection. He says the soul is elastic like a balloon—it can grow larger through suffering
Loss can enlarge our capacity for anger, depression, despair and anguish, all natural and legitimate emotions whenever we experience loss. But once enlarged, the soul is also capable of experiencing greater joy, strength, peace and love.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, a philosopher who teaches at Yale, lost his adult son in a tragic
mountain climbing accident. In his book, The Lament for a Son, he wrote, “The value of suffering is the valley of soul-making.” Obviously, loss can make us less; but loss can also make us more.”
In 2 Cor. 4:17 Paul says, “For our light and momentary suffering will produce in us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all.”
When we suffer, and perhaps like Gerald Sittser and Nicholas Wolterstorff, you or your loved ones have suffered great loss, we typically don’t know, at least in the short run, why we have been allowed to experience this great suffering or loss, but we know that God can redeem suffering and that in the economy of God, a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.
Peter also points out that God redeems our suffering in the world to come. Peter says that, through Christ, God has given us a new birth: 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.
What Peter and the Scriptures teach us that one day, in part because of our suffering, we will receive an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. What Peter and the Scriptures teach us is that, if we belong to God, our suffering is never ultimately in vain.
The Scriptures do not teach that one day we will lose our individuality and become completely nothing, melding into the nothingness of the universe, but that one day we will return to a new Earth—a new Earth that is renewed and perfected.
Tim Keller says future life will not just be a consolation for the life we have never had, but a restoration of the things that we have always longed for.
This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired, but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.
Earlier in this series, I talked about how I had lost my wallet at a Vancouver Canucks game. If you have ever lost your wallet, you know the angst you can feel in the hours and the days that follow. Then when this young man returned it, I felt far more joy in my wallet (especially because it contained ID cards) than before I lost the wallet. I was very grateful.
As a young boy, I remember my mother dying… then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. I was so happy to see her, and so relieved--even though she got quite mad at me that day!
Since getting married, I have had a dream from time to time that my wife Sakiko has died. I am very, very sad and I wake up. I realize it was just a dream and I am so happy and grateful to see that she is alive.
In the movie Changeling which is based on a true story, in the late 1920s about 20 young boys are kidnapped and killed. David Clay—one of the boys assumed to have been killed by this kidnapper--about 7 years after being abuducted comes back to his parents. He says, I was afraid to come back earlier because I thought I might be threatened or my parents might be harmed. His parents are overcome with emotion and joy when they see him.
When we have lost something (or even just thought we lost something in a dream) and then get it back, we cherish what and appreciate it in far deeper way.
Because of the resurrection, because Jesus arose from the dead, it means that all of our losses will be restored and that the joy in experiencing what we have lost will be amplified for us because of the loss.
In the climax of The Lord of the Rings Sam discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead, as he thought for a while. He cries out, “I thought you dead, but then I thought I was dead myself!” He said, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” And the answer, according to Christ, is, yes, everything sad is going to come untrue, and will be greater for once having been broken and lost.
Dostoyevsky put it like this in the Brothers Karamazoz: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a painful mirage, like a despicable fabrication of an infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, and that in the world’s finale at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify all that has happened.”
As Augustine said: 'In my deepest wound I will see your glory and it will dazzle me!'
Julian of Norwich in her immortal words said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
The Christian faith does not answer the why of a particular suffering, but it tells us suffering will redeemed… and that a redeemed suffering is better no suffering at all…
The Christian faith’s answer to suffering is not an abstract answer, but a person.
When we look into the face of Jesus Christ, the one thing we cannot say is that God doesn’t love us.
In the face of Jesus Christ, see that God as a human being in Jesus voluntarily experienced the greatest depth of pain.
I have gone into a number of Buddhist temples in Japan and other Asian countries and have looked at the statues of Buddha, some of them large and very impressive. His legs are crossed, his arms are folded, his eyes are closed with a soft smile around his mouth, and a remote look on his face-- detached from sufferings of the world.
But in Christ we have a picture of God, who became a human being, allowed himself to be nailed to a cross, suffered on the cross, bearing in his body our sins and our shame, so that we could be forgiven of our sin and set free from it.
He of course experienced the great physical pain of being crucified, but also the immense emotional pain of being separated from God his Father. It’s painful when we break up with our partner, it’s painful when you lose a parent or spouse or child… but no loss was as great as Jesus losing the infinite love of God that he had enjoyed from all eternity. That is why he cried from the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
He also knew the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.
Jesus knows the physical pain of being whipped and nailed to the cross, searing emotional pain of losing something infinitely precious, the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.
Jesus is present to us in our physical pain, in our heart break, in the pain of our shame, and in all our losses.
He knows suffering first hand and is present with every person who has suffered whether in an Auschwitz concentration camp, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the genocide in Sudan, or right here in Vancouver.
Jesus doesn’t so much give us the answer to the why of our suffering, but he sits with us and weeps with us in our pain.
On the night he was betrayed, he showed how us how much he loved us.
He took bread…
posted by Shigematsu at 5:33 AM
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