It's not every day that I am
introduced by my own pastor. And I've thought of leaving Libertyville
Free Church, Cross Life as it now is, simply because it's not
affording me enough good examples of exegetical fallacies. So it's
delaying the production of the third volume, no end. Biblical theological pillars
needed to support faithful Christian reflection on suffering and evil. If you live long enough, you
will suffer. You will contract cancer, or
Alzheimer's, or both. Or you will be hit by a bus. You may lose your job, or your
spouse, or a child. All you have to do is live long
enough. The only alternative is not living long enough, which
usually means you are making other people suffer. The forms of suffering are extraordinarily
diverse. Wretched diseases like cancer,
Huntington's chorea, MS, typhoid, meningitis, babies with severe
spina bifida, AIDS, suffering from violence, shootings, war,
from nature, so-called, cat-five hurricanes, tsunamis, cruelty,
torture, the increasing decrepitude of age, the pain of arthritis,
the despair of dementia. And every worldview faces questions
arising from such suffering. These are not simply Christian
questions. They're questions that arise simply because we're
human beings and we live in a world that has a great deal of pain. Well, this is a cheerful way
to begin a lecture, isn't it? Of course, questions regarding
suffering and evil are raised by the Bible itself. Many Psalms,
for example, Jeremiah, not for nothing he is labeled the weeping
prophet. He's not at all sure that God has dealt with him quite
fairly. Job, of course, and Habakkuk, who can understand how God can
use a nation to chastise another nation. What he can't understand
is how God can use a more wicked nation to chastise what seems
to be a less wicked nation. The book of Revelation with Saints
under the throne crying, how long, O Lord? Now, I hasten to make clear what
I will not attempt to do in this talk. I will not offer guidelines
as to how to help people going through such suffering, though
I'll drop a few hints at the end. That's an important topic,
but it's not my topic this afternoon. Rather, I'm going to outline
biblical theological pillars needed to support faithful Christian
reflection on suffering and evil. That is, this is a kind of prophylactic
medicine. This is stuff we should think
about before the evil day comes. What theological structures should
be a part of our mental architecture before the evil day arrives? So here are six pillars to plant
deeply, pillars which together support a God-centered, biblical,
biblically-driven framework that Christians need when the inevitable
days of suffering dawn. Number one, insights from the beginning of
the Bible's storyline. The Bible insists that when God
made everything, he made everything good. Indeed, very good. Moreover, the Bible insists that
the created order is different from God. God made everything. And it is the doctrine of creation
which, in scripture, establishes our fundamental obligation to
God. It establishes the basis of our
accountability to God. He made us, he designed us for
his own glory, for our good, and he knows what is best. Then we come to the fall. This is crucial regarding our
understanding of what is wrong with the world, that is, regarding
the nature and origins of suffering and evil. this is not going to be the same
as the outlook in philosophical naturalism, where, strictly speaking,
it's difficult to speak of evil in any sort of transcendent sense,
because at the end of the day, what happens is nothing more
than quarks with half-lives in nanoseconds, atoms and molecules
banging into each other, the statistical probability of quantum
bits of energy doing this as opposed to that. It's different from any sort
of ontological dualism. Think the force, which seems
to be pretty neutral until you decide to opt on the good side
or the dark side of it. Or think sovereign God and sovereign
devil, both sovereignties, biting against each other and neither
absolute. None of that is a biblical frame of reference. From the
Bible's perspective, suffering and evil are bound up with our
sin and the curse of God that our sin has attracted. Directly
or indirectly, things track back to the fall. On the whole, then,
the Bible expresses surprise, not that we suffer, but that
we are not wiped out. God is a consuming fire. It is
of the Lord's mercy that we are not consumed. Romans makes it
clear that the fundamental reason why the final judgment has not
yet fallen on this damned world is the Lord's forbearance. That
is entirely alien to the way most of us think about suffering
and evil. While we're saying, why me? The
Bible is really saying, you really should go to hell. Now, I put it that bluntly because
that represents quite a lot of biblical texts. To put it another
way, in much of the Bible, what provokes wondering reflection
is not human suffering but God's grace. A remarkable passage that
gets this point across in a telling way is Luke 13, 1-5. Let me read those verses to you
to remind you of their content. Now there were some present at
that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate
had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, Do you think
that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans
because they suffered this way? I tell you, no. But unless you
repent, you too will all perish. Or those 18 who died when the
tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were more guilty
than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you too
will all perish. Now, the two stories back to
back are doubly interesting because one kind of suffering comes about
because of a wicked man. That is, Pilate has attacked
people in their temple worship so that their blood is mixed
with the blood of the animals that they are then currently
offering. This is the direct result of
a wicked man. But the other suffering is what
we call an act of nature, or in insurance categories, an act
of God. That is, a tower falls, and it
kills 18 people. Nobody blew it up. Nobody flew
a plane into it. It just happened for whatever
reason. And in each case, Jesus is concerned
that people do not draw the wrong inference. What he says in both
cases is that you must not conclude that those who were killed were
more wicked than people who were not killed, who might have been
offering sacrifices, who might have been standing under the
tower. They were not more wicked. But then he does not go the next
step and say, which is what our generation would be more likely
to say, they were just as good as the rest of you. What he does
is say precisely the opposite. What he says is, you all deserve
the same thing, and you will all perish. So these accidents
or this violence or this suffering is merely a foretaste of the
universal suffering that is brought about on the last day, and we
all deserve it. Do you recall the pronouncements
of two well-known fundamentalist preachers after 9-11? I refrain
from mentioning their names. They achieved instantaneous notoriety
for saying that the reason that these towers fell, the reason
for this destruction of 3,000 lives was because of America's
carelessness about such matters as abortion and homosexuality
and rising marital decay and so forth. Well, there was such
a hue and cry that eventually they made public apologies and
so forth. But I recall thinking at the
time that they were almost right and horribly wrong. They were
almost right in that they did see that God is a sovereign God
even over what we call disasters. What was wrong with what they
said was that they were busy condemning other people's sins.
Instead of acting like Isaiah, saying, I am a man of unclean
lips and I live amongst a people of unclean lips, then they were
saying, it's all because of these other people's sins. I don't
commit abortion. I don't engage in homosexuality. My marriage
is stable. So they were busy condemning
other people's sins. Supposing they had said instead, it surely can't be thought too
surprising that God would visit us with judgment in his sovereignty.
considering our lust nationally for porn, our endless pursuit
of material prosperity, the glorification of greed, our
self-righteousness, our nurtured bitterness. Supposing you'd spoken
on those terms. Supposing they had said, don't
you understand? This catastrophic judgment does
not mean that those who jumped from the 95th floor were more
wicked than you. What it means is that unless
you repent, you will all, all perish. These are insights from the beginning
of the Bible storyline, the first pillar, The accumulated insights
from the beginning of the Bible storyline cannot address all
our questions. It is, after all, only one of
six pillars. But it does orientate us toward the recognition that
in the light of the creation and the fall, we human beings
deserve condemnation. And that what is fundamentally
surprising in biblical terms is not that there is suffering
and evil, but that by God's grace we are not completely condemned. Number two. insights from the
end of the Bible's storyline. Eschatology, a new heaven and
a new earth to be gained and a hell to be feared. I suspect we don't think enough
about either today for all kinds of reasons. One reason we don't
think enough about heaven and earth is because We haven't spent
enough time on the biblical passages that depict it, which are exceedingly
diverse. If I were to mention heaven to
you, I suspect that many in this room would instantly call to
mind one of those nasty little line diagrams in which heaven
is represented by somebody wearing a white nightgown, playing a
harp, sitting on a puffy cloud. Well, I've got nothing against
harps. I don't even have anything against
white nightgowns. Although, with my pale skin,
they don't do me any service. But on the other hand, it is
such a betrayal of what we should be thinking about when we think
of the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness,
a place of praise, of the vizio dei, the vision of God. They
will see my face. A place of work. Hard work. You've been faithful over a few
things. I will now make you ruler over many things. In other words,
so far all you've done is multiply five bags of gold. You've multiplied $50 million
into $100 million. Small potatoes. Now I'm gonna
give you a real job, God says. There's so many ways of thinking
what the new heaven and the new earth will be like. Negatively,
no more death, no more decay, no more sorrow, no more tears,
no more jealousy, no more hate, no more lust, no more war, no
more fear, no more crying, and positively loving one another
as we love ourselves and God with all our heart and soul and
mind and strength. And hell, regularly displayed as a place
of torment, not something you can easily excise from the Bible
when the one who speaks most about it is the Lord Jesus himself.
Read the end of Revelation 20 if you want to be convinced that
there is conscious, ongoing, eternal torment, even if Luke
12 makes it clear that some are beaten with more stripes and
some with fewer stripes. Now, what do we learn from all
of this? There is no utopia here. We're entering into the silly
political season again. And everybody is touting their
ideas, presenting them in such a way as to suggest, provided
you follow my policies, we will have peace on earth, justice
in the country, national prosperity, the rising tide will lift all
boats, there will be justice and equitability, and so on and
so on and so on. I'm not suggesting for a moment
Christians shouldn't enter into politics, but Christians who
enter into politics should never for a moment give the false impression
that if we follow their policies that utopia will thereby be introduced.
Clearly some policies are better than others, some politics are
better than others, but we are slow to learn that
there is no utopia here. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote
an essay called The End of History. turned it into a book in 1992.
And his argument was quite simple. With the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the demise of the USSR empire, therefore he was saying, history
as we know it is really coming to an end. History is marked
by major conflicts, political conflagrations, wars. And now
if one of the big players has been removed, China he sort of
had to include in a footnote somewhere, If one of the big
players has been removed, then there may be skirmishes and so
forth, small-level conflicts for the next 300 years or so,
but at the end of the day, history will no longer be about conflict
and war, because gradually democracy will take over and there will
be peace. Does anybody think that he's
got it right today? I remember when I read the book,
I thought to myself, Either Fukuyama's right or Jesus is right, but
they're not both right. I mean, Jesus says there will
be wars and rumors of wars. Do not be dismayed, the end is
not yet. The problem is not the economic systems. The problem
at the end of the day is the human heart. But if we are required to think
over a post-death eternal scale, How must that perspective change
our valuations of suffering and evil in this life? Do not lay
up for yourself treasures on earth where moth and rust corrode,
where thieves dig through and steal. Lay up for yourself treasures
in heaven where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves
do not dig through and steal. Why? Because, Jesus says, where
your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In other
words, Jesus' statement is not an exhortation to watch your
heart so you'll have the right treasure. It's just the opposite. Choose the right treasure, because
the treasure will tug your heart. What you value most is what you
will fantasize over, what you'll think about, what you'll daydream
about, what you'll put money and time and energy into. And
he says that our treasure, our ultimate treasure, must be in
the new heaven and the new earth. That's why the apostle can say,
I reckon that the sufferings of this evil world are not to
be compared with the glories yet to come. It's why Jesus can
insist, what shall it profit any of us if we gain the whole
world and lose our own soul? In fact, even disasters such
as earthquakes, the Bible can view as the beginning of sorrows,
Luke 21. Often the big disasters disturb
us in our generation because they challenge our desire for
equanimity. That's why the tsunami that hit
Japan made worldwide headlines, even though in terms of death
toll, the equivalent of three tsunamis hit Africa every year
in terms of AIDS, famine, and tribal strife. And we're not
all that upset about those because that's status quo. I recall a number of years ago
reading the little essay by C.S. Lewis, Learning in Wartime. Some
of you may know it. It's everywhere on the net. You
can find it very easily. Learning in wartime. You will
recall, I'm sure, that Lewis himself fought in World War I
in the trenches. He was spared when many of his
friends died. His whole unit was wiped out.
He had received a minor wound and was sent back, and then the
next thing that happened, his unit was wiped out. So the beginning
of World War II, about 20 years later, When World War II broke
out, the chaplain of the university church in Oxford, not knowing
quite what to say, asked Lewis, who was already developing a
reputation as a bit of an apologist, to speak to the students. The
place was packed out that Sunday night as Lewis climbed into the
pulpit and he said, in part, A university is a society for
the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected
to make yourselves or to start making yourselves into what the
Middle Ages called clerks, into philosophers, scientists, scholars,
critics, historians. And at first sight, this seems
to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use
of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?
or even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted
by death or military service, why should we, indeed, how can
we continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when
the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in
the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns? Now, it seems to me that we shall
not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the
side of certain other questions which every Christian ought to
have asked himself in peacetime. I spoke just now of fiddling
while Rome burns. But to a Christian, the true
tragedy of Nero must not be that he fiddled while the city was
on fire, but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must
forgive me for this crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better
Christians than I in these days do not mention heaven and hell
even in a pulpit. I know too that nearly all the references
to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source, but
then that source is our Lord himself. People will tell you
it is St. Paul, but that is untrue. These
overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable
from the teaching of Christ or of his church. If we do not believe
them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do,
we must mention them sometimes and overcome our spiritual prudery.
The moment we do so, we can see that every Christian who comes
to a university must at all times face a question compared with
which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is
right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are
every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell to spend
any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on
such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics
or biology. If human culture can stand up
to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our
interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues,
but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our
eyes are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open
to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions, and much more
of the same. This second pillar, then, the
accumulated insights from the end of the Bible storyline, cannot
address all our questions. It is, after all, only one of
six pillars. But it does orientate us to the
recognition that Christians must live their lives now and make
their valuations of life now in the light of eternity. The
church is in the business of preparing people to die. The
church is in the business of training people to await Christ's
return. Some years ago, there was a woman,
we'll call her Mary, who contracted cancer about the time my wife
did. My wife's was serious, hers was
not. She was treated and judged to
have escaped anything serious. Seven years later, hers came
back, and it was vicious. They discovered that the thing
metastasized very quickly, and they put in a shunt so that they
could put in chemicals directly into her brain because the cancer
had already got to her brain. This woman was influential. She
was a leader in her denomination. She and her husband, for example,
stored supplies in their basement for returning missionaries. Missionaries
come back, and they've been serving in countries where the power
is different, and they don't have any toasters or irons or
blankets. Who needs blankets when you're
serving in an equatorial country? They provided all of these things
for missionaries. They collected them from others.
Don't give us junk. Missionaries deserve better than
junk. I can hear her voice still. And because she was influential
in the city and in the denomination and so on, when they called a
prayer meeting for her, a Saturday prayer meeting, 286 people showed
up. I wasn't one of them. I was away,
but my wife was there. And as the time went on, hour
after hour of corporate praying together, there were more and
more prayers that the Lord would heal this woman. Lord, you have
promised if two or three are gathered together and agreed,
you know? We got 286 of us that are in agreement. This woman really needs to live.
I mean, so many operations in the church and missions depend
on her and her efforts and so on. And it got more and more
enthusiastic as the hours went by, until finally it was my wife's
turn to pray. She got up and prayed along these
lines. Dear Heavenly Father, we do ask you to heal our sister
Mary. But if not, teach her to die
well. Give her a heritage for her husband
and children. Give her an anticipation of the
Gloria to be revealed. Free her from earth's shackles.
Make her homesick for heaven. Teach her to die well. Well, you could have cut the
air with a knife because suddenly it wasn't 286, it was only 285. Some of the relatives later explained
to us that they started praying that my
wife's cancer would return. That prayer meeting was in September.
In November, the husband phoned me and said, Don, I got to talk
to you. I got to talk to you now. I got to talk to you now.
I said, well, I'll come over. No, I don't want my wife to hear
this. Okay, we'll meet in a coffee shop. Do you know what he wanted? He wanted permission to let her
go. The church was marvelous. They
provide food. They provided meals. They provided
people in the house to clean up, look after things. They were
providing care. If you went in and offered food
and so on, provided things, how's it going today, Mary? Oh, I'm
in a lot of pain. Don't worry, we've prayed for you. The Lord's
going to fix this up. But nobody going in to say, Mary,
it looks as if you're going to die. Are you ready? Do you hear
the voice of Jesus saying, come home? And to even talk along those
lines meant that you were letting down the side. All these prayers
going the other way, and now you're talking about death? Where's
the faith in that? No, no. This second pillar brings
a different set of perspectives. Number three, insights from the
place of innocent suffering. The starkest biblical treatment,
of course, is the book of Job. I wish I had time to outline
the major arguments. I can merely drift through. In
Job 1 and 2, Job doesn't know that God has a bet with Satan. God says, if you considered my
servant Job, he really is faithful, you know.
He's a perfect man. The Hebrew word is tam, thoroughly
mature, as good as it gets. And Satan says, oh yeah, he knows
what side is. bread is buttered on, take away
all his wealth and his prosperity and all of that, he'll curse
you to your face." So God says, go ahead, take it all away. Bands
of marauding Sabaeans come in and Chaldeans and so on, the
cattle go and the sheep go, the herds go, and then a windstorm
comes and the very place where his 10 children are having a
party, the house collapses, they all die. Naked came I into this
world, naked will I go out. The Lord gives, the Lord takes
away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." In all this, Job did
not speak foolishly or charge God with evil. Oh, yeah, the
devil says, but skin for skin, everything a man will give for
his health. Go ahead, do your worst, but spare his life. And
pretty soon, he's sitting on an ash pit, scraping his scabs
with broken pottery, and his wife says, curse God and die. That's the background. Job doesn't
know what's at stake at the cosmic level. He's just hurting. And then three miserable comforters
fly in. They do one wise thing. They
shut up for the first week. And then the theology starts,
the drama that occupies all the way to chapter 31, chapters 3
to 31. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad
the Shuhite, some have called him the shortest man in scripture,
and Zophar the Naamathite. And their arguments run something
along these lines. Job, do you believe that God
is sovereign? Yes. Do you believe that God
is good? Yes. So if God is sovereign and
God is good, and he's clobbering you, what does that say about
who you are? Well, I know that God is sovereign
and God is good. Man is born to trouble as the
sparks fly upward. I have to say that I really don't
deserve this, you know? Do you hear what you're saying? That's suggesting that God is
doing something that's unjust. You just said that God is good.
If God is sovereign and God is good, then he's not unjust, and
therefore any judgment on you must be just. Wouldn't you say?
Well, I agree that God is just, but I still have to say that
what I'm suffering isn't really quite fair. I'd really like to
have a chat with God, but he's hiding his face from me, so I
can't see him. And the debate gets ratcheted
up and ratcheted up until Job says conflicting things. On the
one hand, though he slay me, yet will I trust him. And on
the other hand, I wish I had a lawyer. Well, you've gone a long way
once you wish you had a lawyer to talk to God. And eventually,
the three friends shut up because they can't bring him to any sort
of public repentance. They go so far as to say, you
know, maybe you have forgotten all the sins you committed, but
God hasn't forgotten any of them. If you just repent of the sins
that you've forgotten, The sins that you must have committed
for God to bring on this judgment, repent and tell God you're sorry,
then God will take away all the suffering. Job says, how can
I possibly repent of something that I don't know that I've done?
That would be a kind of lie, a kind of criticism to God. It
would be a kind of way of saying, I must have repented, therefore,
I must have sinned, therefore, I must repent in order to get
some blessings out of you. That's so dishonest that he spends
three, four chapters just defending his own integrity. and the friends
are silenced. Then Elihu speaks. There are
long debates about his contribution. He's a cocky young man. A lot
of what he says seems to be more or less what the friends say,
and yet he makes one important point. He blames the friends
for not being able to answer Job effectively. In that sense,
he sides with God at the end, and he blames Job for being so
critical of God. Not for having sinned in the
first place, but for setting himself up as if he can answer
God. That rather sets the stage for God himself to answer in
chapters 38 and 39. And what God says is, Job, have
you ever designed a snowflake? Were you around when I cast Orion
to the heavens? How are you at designing a hippopotamus,
Job? Just over two chapters of such
questions. Until at the beginning of Chapter 40, Job says, I'm
sorry I spoke. I'm beginning to get the point.
There are a lot of things I don't understand. And God says, stand
up on your feet like a man. I got two more chapters of questions
to ask you. Until finally you get to Chapter 42, and Job says,
I repent. Now, it's important for the understanding
of the entire book to grasp that Job is not repenting of some
alleged prior sins that brought about this disaster. What he's
repenting of, rather, is his protestations of righteousness
so strongly versed that they look as if they're criticisms
of God, when, by God's rhetorical questions, Job should have more
quickly come to the place where he recognized there are things
he doesn't understand. and his obligation is to trust
God. In other words, one of the strongest
lessons of the book is the limits of our knowledge. God is more
interested in our trust in him, granted what we do know, than
in providing more explanation. Not least because he knows full
well we can never be omniscient. God cannot tell us everything
because we cannot receive it. If we could receive it, we ourselves
would be God. At least we'd have the attribute
of omniscience of God. So this third pillar, the accumulated
insights from reflection on Job and the challenge of innocent
suffering, cannot address all our questions. It is, after all,
only one of six pillars, but it does orientate us to recognizing
the severe limitations of our understanding. That prepares
us for the next pillar, number four. insights from the mystery
of providence. Now, here I want to go one small
but important step beyond the limitations of our knowledge
to consideration of some of the attributes of God and how those
attributes should function in our lives. I repeat, as we consider
the mystery of providence, I want to consider with you some of
the attributes of God and how they should function in our lives.
Let me begin with two propositions. Number one, in the Bible, God
is absolutely and unqualifiedly sovereign, but his sovereignty
never functions to mitigate human responsibility. That's the first proposition. Second, human beings are morally
responsible creatures. By morally responsible, I mean
they believe and disbelieve, they obey and disobey, and so
forth. And such actions are significant. They are morally significant.
They are held accountable for such things. So human beings
are morally significant creatures, but human responsibility expressed
in such decisions, belief, unbelief, and so on, so on, so on, never
makes God absolutely contingent. Now, because I've written extensively
on this subject, I'm afraid I could rabid on for several hours and
not come to an end of the material. Let me direct your attention
to three passages rather briefly. The first is Genesis chapter
50, verses 19 and 20. Here, Joseph's brothers, after the old man has died, beg Joseph to have mercy on them
because they're afraid he will now wreak his retribution upon
them for having sold him into slavery. Joseph, by way of reply, says,
who am I to take the place of God? When you sold me into slavery,
don't you understand? God, you intended it for evil,
but God intended it for good. Now, what is so interesting about
that way of expressing things is that the text does not say,
you intended it for evil, And it happened because God was taking
a walk that day or was having a little snooze and didn't pay
much attention. But mercifully, he's such a good
chess player that he came back and fixed it all up with some
deft moves. And so as a result, on the chess
piece of life, I came out as a prime minister of Egypt." He
doesn't say that. Nor does he say, God intended
it for good. He was going to send me down
to Egypt in an air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven limousine, but
unfortunately, you guys mucked up his plan. He didn't see that
one coming. but rather in one and the same event, God's intentions
were good and the human intentions were evil. There's no speculation about
one side not paying attention or being outwitted by the other. Second passage, Isaiah 10, beginning
at verse 5. Here God says, through the prophet,
Woe to the Assyrian." Now, the Assyrians at this juncture had
done a lot of damage in the north and were pressing on down now
to the south, a bloodthirsty, cruel, powerful regional superpower. Woe to the Assyrian, God says,
the rod of my anger. That is, God views the Assyrians
as the expression of his own wrath. in whose hand is the club
of my wrath. I send him against a godless
nation." That is, against his own covenant people. I send the
Assyrians against a wicked nation. I dispatch them against the people
who anger me to seize loot and snatch plunder and to trample
them down like mud in the streets. That's what God is doing through
his tools. But this is not what he intends.
Back to this intention thing again. This is not what he has
in mind. His purpose is to destroy, to
put an end to many nations. Are not my commanders all kings,
he says? That is, even his military officers
are equivalent in glory and power to petty kings in other countries.
Has not Calno fared like Carchemish? Is not Hamat like Arpad and Samaria
like Damascus, cities that he's already beaten up? As my hand
sees the kingdoms of the idols, kingdoms whose images excel,
those of Jerusalem and Samaria, shall I not deal with Jerusalem
and her images as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?" So Isaiah
says, when the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion,
notice that, his work against Mount Zion, his work in using
the Assyrians to beat up Mount Zion. When the Lord has finished
all his work against Mount Zion in Jerusalem, he will say, I
will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his
heart and the haughty look in his eyes. For he says, By the
strength of my hand I have done this, and by my wisdom, because
I have understanding, I removed the boundaries of nations, I
plundered their treasures, like a mighty one, I subdued kings.
God says, Does the axe raise itself above the person who swings
it? Or the saw boast against the one who uses it? As if a
rod were to wield the person who lifts it up, or a club brandish
the one who is not, would? In other words, you have a situation
where God sends in the Assyrians to punish his covenant people,
then he punishes the Assyrians for doing it. Because they're
doing it, as far as they're concerned, in pride, in intentional cruelty,
in greed, And then perhaps the most spectacular
passage along these lines, there are many, many of them in Scripture,
but one that no Christian can possibly ignore, is Acts 4. In Acts 4, Peter and John, having
faced threats, return to the church, their own people, it's
called, 423, and report all that the chief priests and the elders
have said. So the church bends its knee to pray. They say, Sovereign
Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything
in them. Incidentally, it is very commonly the case across
church history that when churches face suffering and persecution,
the first thing they confess in their prayers is God's sovereignty,
as here. Sovereign Lord, you made the
heavens, the earth, and so on. You spoke by the Holy Spirit
through the mouth of our servant of your servant, our father David.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings
of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against
the Lord and against his anointed one?" And then these two verses.
Indeed, on the one hand, 427, Herod and Pontius Pilate met
together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this
city to conspire against your holy servant, Jesus, whom you
anointed. Why did Jesus go to the cross?
because there was a two-bit conspiracy in a tiny little kingdom on the
eastern end of the Mediterranean, a conspiracy loaded with corruption.
Next verse, they did what your power and will had decided beforehand
should happen. If you remove the first verse
and all of its entailments and have only the second verse, then
you preserve God's plan to bring about the atonement. But then,
where's the conspiracy? Where's the sin? If they're innocent
because God planned it, then there's no sin to atone for.
If you remove the second verse to preserve the first, then the
reason Jesus died is because of this two-bit conspiracy. But that's got nothing to do
with the eternal plan of God, or the lamb slain from before
the foundation of the earth in God's mind, or the prophetic
significance of Yom Kippur, or the Passover lamb, the messianic
understanding of Isaiah 53 or anything else. Now, in all of this, embedded
in these scriptures is the teaching that God is unqualifiedly good.
We saw that already in the first instance, didn't we? God intended
it for good. You intended it for evil. This
means that however we understand God's sovereignty, God stands
asymmetrically behind good and evil. He stands behind good in
such a way that the good is finally creditable to him. He stands
behind evil in such a way that although it never escapes the
boundaries of his sovereignty, the evil is always creditable
only to secondary causalities. And if you think that's just
a bit too convenient for God, my answer is, it's the only depiction
of God we've got. God is always represented as
unqualifiedly good. As James puts it, there's no
shadow of darkness in him at all. Our perception that these propositions
are hard to hold together is, I think, tied to the very attributes
of God presented in Scripture. Let me jump a couple of steps
so that you can see the point. In Scripture, God is presented
as utterly transcendent, above space and time, and utterly sovereign. He's the God who inhabits eternity,
and he turns the heart of the king in any direction he wants.
Dice are thrown, the lot is thrown in the lap, and which side comes
up depends on God's choice. Not a bird falls from the heavens
apart from God's sanction. But the same scriptures also
present God as personal. And all our understanding of
personal, a very slippery word acknowledged, is that that means
interacting with other persons. He asks questions. He probes. He says, Adam, where are you? And you're not supposed to infer,
oh, God doesn't know. Because there are too many other
passages that say in scripture, how shall I escape from his presence?
If I fly to the wings of the dawn, you're there. If I go to
the depths of Sheol, you're there. You can't get away from God.
So what is God doing when he addresses Adam and says, where
are you? In fact, more broadly, how do
you understand that this God who is utterly transcended and
sovereign is also personal, interactive? Interacting, if you please, with
finite persons like you and me in space and time. He's transcendent
above space and time. We're in space and time. All
of our personal relationships are bound up with space and time
categories. And now, suddenly, this God deigns
to interact with us. Hence, the mystery of providence. There are so many things we don't
understand about God. I barely understand what time
is. I'm quite certain I don't understand what eternity is.
Is eternity merely time stretched in both directions? Is it another
dimension, another category? But God is described as the one
who inhabits eternity. Now, at this point, I'm going
to dare stretch my time just a little longer because I want
to interact with my colleague, Dr. Thomas McCall. Now, the reason
I'm doing so is because he's about to come up with a book.
It's called An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology,
published by IVP at Downers Grove this year. It's not out yet,
but I managed to secure an advanced copy. On pages 56 to 61, he discusses
and critiques compatibilism. Compatibilism is the word that
I use to say that those two propositions I gave you, God is utterly sovereign,
but his sovereignty does not mitigate human responsibility.
Human beings are morally responsible creatures, but that responsibility
does not make God absolutely contingent. Holding both of them
together, I call compatibilism. And he discusses and critiques
compatibilism on pages 56 to 61, and I seem to be the chief
target of his critique. I'm sorry to say he's not here
today. In one sense, it's probably a
great relief for me. Probably it's a relief for you,
too, because maybe our discussion would have taken up all of the
discussion time, and that wouldn't be quite fair to the rest. He's
a dear brother, and he says all kinds of nice things in these
pages as well, I'm happy to say. To respond to him in an adequate
way would require that I extend this lecture by an hour or two,
and apart from the fact that I would thereby lose most of
my audience, it would also turn this talk into an interchange
between the categories of Scripture and the categories of analytic
philosophy. Doubtless a useful exercise, but not one for this
afternoon. But perhaps I may make a couple of observations
on Dr. McCall's informed and courteous critique, which you
can judge for yourself when the book comes out. By all means,
buy it and read it for yourself. Just two. Dr. McCall charges me with using
compatibilism in a way in which none of his philosopher friends
use it. His philosopher friends use compatibilism
to describe the belief that absolute determinism and freedom are compatible. And his philosopher friends,
and McCall himself, say that compatibilism doesn't work. Compatibilism
should simply be rejected. So when I defend compatibilism,
and my two poles are not determinism and freedom, but God's sovereignty
and human responsibility, those are my two poles, He argues that
I am out of step with the world of analytical philosophy by using
the word compatibilism in another way. I plead half guilty. Of course, I don't use the word
quite the way they do. I'm using biblical categories, not categories
like determinism, which he very carefully defines in categories
that you can't find anywhere in Scripture. But I would say
that some use the word the way I do, some philosophers, See,
for example, Robert Young, Freedom, Responsibility, and God, 1975
in the Library of Philosophy and Religion, or Paul Helm and
some others. Second, Dr. McCall's treatment, by which
he dismisses compatibilism as he defines it, that is the way
the word is used amongst the philosophers, depends heavily
on certain mechanistic models of determinism. If those models
are assumed, I am not a determinist. Yet because of my belief based
on scripture that God is utterly sovereign, I remain convinced
that everything is determined in the sense that nothing but
nothing but nothing escapes the bounds of God's sovereign will.
But I don't like to call myself a determinist because determinist
and determinism have overtones of such a mechanized definition
of things that freedom really is excluded entirely. I prefer
to use biblical categories. If God is the determiner, as
opposed to mechanistic models, the way God determines all things
is shrouded in other factors. Things that I don't know enough
about. The relationship between time and eternity. The fact that
God is personal, sovereign and yet personal. The fact that scriptures
can speak of contingency. If they had done this, I would
have done that. The fact that human responsibility is not so
much grounded in freedom to escape the constraints of necessity,
but in voluntarism. see especially Warfield. Well,
so much for my excursus. I'm sure Dr. McCall will attempt
to sort me out when he returns and listens to this recording.
For the moment, assuming the truth of compatibilism as I have
used it, what bearing does the simultaneous affirmation of both
my propositions have on our meditation on suffering and evil? That's
the point of the talk, after all. The most important factor
is this. When you have two poles, that
are in some ways in tension with each other, it is important to
use these twin poles, these twin propositions, as they are used
in scripture and in no other way. In other words, you don't want
to infer from God's sovereignty that therefore we're not really
responsible after all, because that would be drawing an inference
from one pole that dismisses the other pole. Do you see? And
you don't want to draw an inference from human responsibility that
Therefore, God holds his breath and waits to see how things work
out. He's not really utterly sovereign after all. So then, how is suffering viewed
in the light of this polarity in Scripture? Well, suffering
can be seen as a temporal discipline, Hebrews 12. Suffering serves to prepare us
to help others. Comforting others with the comfort
with which we ourselves have been comforted, 2 Corinthians
1. Suffering as a form of witness,
seeing our good deeds and thereby glorifying God. Suffering makes
us homesick for heaven. You watch people declining slowly
and robust men and women who enjoy life so much here, gradually
losing so many of their functions and ability and strength until
really, heaven really looks wonderful in their eyes. which is a gracious
way for God to prepare them for the culture shock. Suffering
to promote humility, especially for gifted people, as in 2 Corinthians
12. Because of the greatness of the
revelations he's received, God sends him a thorn in the flesh,
a messenger from Satan. And so, as a result, Paul learns
that he is not to be judged by his claim to have seen visions,
but only by what he sees and It says and does. He is afraid
that people will think more of him than he deserves. Most of
us go through life afraid that people will think too little
of us. Paul goes through life fearing that people will think
too much, and he has learned that at the price of a thorn. So the gold and silver of your
faith will be refined," 1 Peter 1, and so many more. It is important
to work through passages that talk about God's purposes in
these things and see his sovereignty and our responsibility in those
events, see how they work out in the attitudes that we should
be adopting and forming in our mind in the light of such verities
about God. So this fourth pillar, the accumulated
insights from the mystery of providence, cannot address all
our questions. It is, after all, only one of
six pillars. but it does orientate us to reflect on the attributes
of God and how we should function in our lives because of them.
Five and six are the most important, perhaps, but I'm going to deal
with them more briefly because they are much better known. Insights
from the centrality of the incarnation and the cross. God is sovereign, yet in the
person of his son, He submits to evil to overturn evil. The Jews, according to the account
in Caesarea Philippi, expected a Messiah who was powerful, a
Messiah who was going to suffer and be crucified and die, rise
again the third day. It was simply outside their expectation. And so, as a result, the New
Testament says a great deal about unjust suffering. bearing our guilt and shame,
the very guilt and shame that caused such suffering and evil
in the first place. Talk about unjust. I know a family where their daughter, who's now
33, when she was only 15, lost her best friend to leukemia. The family was a Christian family.
They talked about these things. There was grief. There was sorrow. There was open discussion and
so on. But a few months later, the father was walking down the
hall outside his daughter's room and heard her crying inside.
He tapped on the door and went in. She was crying her eyes out. She threw herself into his arms
and just sobbed. And he said, come on, tell me
about it. She said, Daddy, God could have saved my best friend,
and he didn't, and I hate him. Now, what are you supposed to
say under those circumstances, you wicked, wicked child? What the father said was the
best he could do was, I'm glad you told me. You might as well
tell me. God knows your heart in any case.
You're not hiding anything from him. But before you write God off,
I do have a couple of questions. Number one, do you want a God
who, though he's very powerful, is a bit like the genie in Aladdin's
lamp, always at the instantaneous command of whoever holds the
lamp? In which case, the person who holds the lamp is really
God. Do you want a God whom you can command to do what you want? Or will you turn to the God of
the Bible who sometimes hides things from you and doesn't give
his reasons, but wants you to trust him anyway? And the second
question is this, what are you going to do with Jesus? You lost your friend. God lost his son. In fact, he
didn't lose him, he gave him. And sometimes when all of the
questions seem so hard, the very best thing you can do in the
entire universe is go to the cross and gaze at it and weep. You see, I know that family quite
well. The daughter was my daughter. And I have her permission to
tell this story. World War I was perhaps the most
brutal and stupid of wars. It produced a number of remarkable
poets like Wilfred Owen and others. One of the minor poets was Edward
Schilletaw. He didn't write many good ones,
but he wrote one very remarkable one. It's called Jesus of the
Scars, in which He alludes to Jesus showing up and showing
his scars after the resurrection in John chapter 20. Halfway through
the poem, he says, if when the doors are shut, thou drawest
near, only reveal those hands, that side of thine. We know today
what wounds are, never fear. Show us thy scars, we know the
countersign. The other gods were strong, but
thou wast weak. They rode, but thou didst stumble
to thy throne. And to our wounds only God's
wounds can speak, and not a god has wounds but thou alone." Sometimes the best and deepest
reflection in the face of evil is simply the cross from which
we derive all comfort. This is a gospel-centered response
to questions of suffering and evil. This fifth pillar, the
accumulated insights from the cross and incarnation, cannot
address all our questions. It is, after all, only one of
six pillars, but it does fasten our gaze on Jesus. And finally,
insights from taking up our cross, and therefore from the persecuted
global church, What we must recognize is that
most of what the New Testament says about suffering focuses,
in fact, on persecution. Unlike most of our books today,
which fasten on the pain of divorce or cancer, physical poverty, discouragement,
being fired at work, some other disease, Alzheimer's, caregivers
who look after people with Alzheimer's. All of which is real suffering.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not mocking any of it. All of it
has to be thought about and addressed. Yet the fact remains that almost
all the passages in the New Testament that talk about suffering Christians
are talking about suffering because of persecution. It's bound up with what it means
to take up our cross daily. The one who took up his cross
in the ancient world was heading out for death, suffering. And
so we have, if we suffer with him, we will reign with him.
We have Jesus saying in John 16, if they persecuted me, they will
persecute you. We have Paul saying to Timothy,
all who live godly lives will suffer persecution. We have Jesus
saying in Matthew 5 that even if you're not suffering physically,
if they're reviling you and saying all manner of evil against you,
you're aligned with the prophets, so rejoice and be glad. We have
the end of Romans 8, verses 31 and following, passages you know
well. You have Philippians 1, verse 29, it has been granted
to you, that is, as a gracious gift. It has been granted to
you on behalf of Christ, not only to believe on his name,
but also to suffer for his sake. God's gracious gift to you is
not only saving faith, but also suffering. And therefore, Paul's
resolution in the third chapter of that book, chapter 3, verse
10, O that I may know him and the power of his resurrection
and the fellowship of his sufferings. And then Acts 5.41, when the
apostles are first beaten up, they rejoice because they were
counted worthy to suffer for the name. If all Christians in
North America who are feeling some pushback from the world
rejoiced that finally they're counted worthy to suffer for
the name. It would transform our attitude towards what's going
on and how we engage in Christian witness. It's so much more Christian
frame of reference than saying, they're taking away my country
and I know not where they have laid it. And this is nothing compared
with the suffering that is going on all over the world. See the
recent book called Christianophobia and other documentation. In other
words, This sixth pillar, the accumulated
insights from Christian suffering, cannot address all our questions.
It is only one of the six pillars, but it does return us to a New
Testament focal point. I conclude with three observations
quickly put. Number one, my approach in this
talk is not simple proof texting. What I'm attempting is worldview
formation, establishing the frame of reference, a God-centered,
biblically-driven frame of reference in which to think about these
matters. These six pillars taken together support a massive vision
that will deeply stabilize us when the evil days come. Number
two, this addresses focused on intellectual, theological worldview
issues— that is, how to think about such matters so as to deepen
our faith. But I would be the first to insist
that when people are going through real crises, struggling in deep
waters, coping with a tsunami, something different and more
immediate may be called for. Marines to establish order. Fresh
water. Housing. Shelter. food, money, workers, reconstruction,
when people are going through individual crises of illness
and the like. Again, so often what's required
is care, comfort, a listening ear. A couple I know well, their
first child was born with very, very severe spina bifida, had
no eyelids. And in the 10 days that the baby
survived, people had to put in artificial drops into the baby's
eyeballs every 10 minutes or so, or else the baby's eyeballs
would dry and crack. So three or four friends just
set up a rodent. They just took over the dropping of the artificial
drops. That's what was needed, not a
discourse on the sovereignty of God, artificial eye drops. But my purpose this afternoon
was prophylactic. not exactly what to do when you
face these things, but how to think, how to establish a biblical
theological framework that prepares you for the evil day. And finally,
this is my finally, finally. As far as I can see from scripture
and from history, Christians who get to know God well do not,
as a rule, think first of all in terms of theodicy when they
suffer, but in two other categories. First, Confession coupled with
pleas for revival. Before you go to bed tonight,
read Nehemiah 8 and 9. The people after the return are
going through all kinds of suffering, all kinds of poverty, all kinds
of opposition, all kinds of work, all kinds of discouragement.
But instead of trying to justify the ways of God to man, as Milton
puts it, They see their own patterned sin in the past, confess their
sin, and plead to God for reformation and revival, that he would hear
from heaven and renew them in the covenant. Second, the second
common category for those who go through deep waters and who
do know God well is, quite frankly, gratitude. Let me tell you about a student
who used to study here. George, not his name, but we'll
call him George. It's a good name. George went
out as a missionary to Bolivia. He was a strapping chap, 6'4",
tall, thin. Why God sends 6'4 types to countries
where the average height is about 5'4", not quite sure, but that's
what God does. He learned the language well, and his mission
wanted him to come back and do a PhD here so that he could return
to Bolivia and train people up in better biblical exegesis and
so forth. While he was in Bolivia, he met
a single woman and the two of them got married and had a little
girl. And so when they came back to start a PhD program here,
the little girl was about three and a half. He started in, was
about six months into it when she was diagnosed with stage
four breast cancer. They stopped the program while
she was taking chemo, radical surgery, all the rest miserable
time. She came through with it. They
had family up in the Twin Cities, and there was lots of care and
support and so on, but it was still a very difficult time.
He came back and pursued his PhD for another six months or
nine months or so when he was diagnosed with advanced stomach
cancer. The cancer hospitals in the metro Chicago area wouldn't
touch him. They said it was a hopeless case. Hospice care was indicated.
But the mission decided to send him up to the Mayo Clinic. They
didn't give him much hope, but they said, there's some experimental
things we could try. They took out 90% of his stomach
and gave him cancer drugs that were really designed for colon
cancer. He came out of it, regained his health and strength, had
to eat every three or four hours because he's only got one-tenth
of a stomach, came back to Trinity, worked some more on his PhD,
and then his wife's cancer returned. and she died. Eventually, he came back to Trinity,
finished his PhD, then spoke in our church. I think it was
before you came. Spoke in our church, and before
returning with his then nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter to Bolivia, he spoke
for 40 minutes on a couple of texts, and basically the burden
of his message was, thankfulness to God. Whether he had ever thought of
these six pillars as such, I have no idea, but he had absorbed
a great deal of biblical theology. I tell you, George's response
was simply that of the normal Christian. Anything less is subnormal. Thanks for your patience.