How Can I Believe God is Good When There's So Much Evil in the World?

The sermon text for today is from Genesis chapter 50.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

And we'll be looking at verses 15 through 21.

And in the Blue Pew Bible Bible, it's on um page 79.

Or you can follow along on your device.

Listen as I read God's word.

When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?

So they sent word to Joseph saying, Your father left these instructions before he died.

This is what you are to say to Joseph.

I ask you to forgive your brothers, the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.

Now please forgive the sins of the servants of God your father.

When their message came to him, Joseph wept.

His brothers came and threw themselves down before him.

We are your slaves, they said.

Am I in the place of God?

You intended harm to me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done.

The saving of many lives.

So then, don't be afraid.

I will provide for you and your children.

And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.

Here ends today's reading.

If I have not yet had the chance to meet you, my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

Uh, if uh you are here today and you are a guy, I need you to uh pay close attention right now.

Uh coming up in just under three weeks, we have uh our next, our second annual men's chili cook-off.

I was okay.

One person's excited about this.

That's great.

I thought they would get at least as much as Parents Night Out, but okay, that's fine.

Uh there's a handful of you who have already RSVP'd for that, so thank you.

Um it's coming up, as I said, on uh Thursday, October 23rd.

This is a chance for us to get together and uh enjoy chili.

And also, this is a competition, remember.

Uh so between now and then, you're going to be want to you're gonna want to be perfecting your chili recipe.

And uh if you take home the prize, you're gonna be coming home with a$25 Amazon gift card as well as this epic traveling chili trophy, which uh Caleb does not want to give up.

But I know there's someone out there who really wants this trophy to be in their house for a year to remind them of how great they are at making chili.

Uh so if you are a guy of any age, uh you were invited to join us uh for the men's chili cook-off.

Uh, please RSVP and submit your chilies to us uh through the digital bulletin uh by scanning the QR code on the blue card that is in front of you.

Uh please let us know you're coming, and uh we look forward to uh enjoying good chili together that evening.

Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to our subject this morning.

Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.

He is the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them.

He remains faithful forever.

He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets prisoners free.

The Lord gives sight to the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous, the Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow.

We thank you, God, that you uh delight to care for those who are vulnerable.

We thank you that you hate when those who are vulnerable are taken advantage of.

And God, as we think about uh the subject of justice this morning, we ask that you would give us eyes to see and ears to hear the good news that's found in the Bible.

God, help us to be attentive this morning.

God, give us uh the ability to see Jesus clearly.

And we ask that as we look to him, that you would help us uh to leave here today changed people because of what we have seen and heard.

Be with us now, we pray.

And we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Uh we are in a series of messages called Asking for a Friend.

And what we have been doing over the course of this fall is we have been exploring questions that you have submitted to us.

Some of these are questions that you personally have, some of these are questions that you know someone in your sphere of influence has about God or faith or the Bible, and uh.

How can I believe God is good when there is so much evil in the world?

How can I possibly believe that God is good when there is so much evil and so much injustice in the world around us?

Here's two things we know to be true.

Number one, our world is filled with evil and injustice.

I'm not gonna spend any time trying to convince you of this because it's so obvious and because it's so self-evident, just open up your news feeds, just go on the internet for a fraction of a moment, turn on the nightly news, and you will see that we live in a world where evil and injustice are all over the place.

But that evil and injustice is not just out there in the world, it's also in our own personal experiences.

Many of us here today have had things done to us.

Many of us have had things thrust upon us that can only be called evil and unjust.

These are things we've never asked for, things we did nothing to deserve, and things from which we may spend the rest of our lives trying to heal.

Our world is filled with evil and injustice, and the second thing we know to be true is that the human heart longs for justice.

Whether it's for school shooters or corrupt politicians or for academics who plagiarize others, or for businesses that use corrupt and dirty business practices to get an edge on their competition, or for someone caught cheating in sports or in some other area of life, or for those guilty of war crimes.

Each one of us has a deep inner longing for justice to be served.

This is hardwired into us.

And I think just like on a very ground popular level, I think this is this explains why it's so satisfying to watch instant karma videos.

You laugh because you know.

Uh, if you don't know about these, go on YouTube and type in instant karma videos, and what happens is people do stupid things and immediately get what's coming to them.

And there's something about it that's so deeply satisfying because so often we see things and it seems like there is no consequence, there is no answer.

If there is a God, and if he is good, why doesn't he do something about the evil and the injustice that is in our world?

Why does he let it go on?

Why doesn't he intervene more often or more quickly?

Those are the questions that we're going to spend our time trying to make a little bit of sense of this morning.

Uh before we go any further, I want to uh just let you know on the front end that what we'll be focusing on today is human evil and injustice.

Okay?

So we're not going to be talking about what uh you may have heard before called natural evil, you know, hurricanes and tornadoes and things where people suffer and die as a result of natural things that happen.

Uh we're going to be focusing on the evil and injustice that takes place one human to another.

So to help us try and make sense of a world that is filled with evil and injustice, let me suggest that there are three places we need to look.

We need to look upward, we need to look inward, and we need to look to the cross.

Okay, so first, what we need to do is we need to look upward.

We need to look upward to God.

If you've been around Elmwood for a while, you've heard us talk about how the Bible is not primarily an instruction manual for life.

It is not primarily a book given to us that just contains rules and religious sayings.

The Bible is one unified story, and first and foremost, the Bible is given to us to reveal who God is.

It is first a book about God.

And so, yes, the Bible does give us instructions, it does give us rules to follow, things like this.

But all those things we see in the Bible serve a greater purpose, which is to help us know who this God is.

And so as we wrestle with this difficult question of the goodness of God and the injustices and the evil we see in our world, I think the first place we need to look is just look at what the Bible says about who God is.

And as we do so, what we see is that he is a God who cares about justice.

He is a God who is himself just.

We can see this as we look back to a place like Leviticus chapter 19, which says this.

Leviticus 19 · chapter mention

Leviticus 19, 15, God commands his people and says, do not pervert justice, do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.

I think it's so important that we see that when God is giving instruction to his people that is designed to form and shape their life as a community, he demands of them that they do not do anything that would lead to injustice.

He commands them to live justly, and it's because he is a God of justice.

And so he wants us as his image bearers to reflect something of his justice in our inner personal relationships with one another.

We can also go to a place like Psalm 33, which says this so well.

In the beginning of Psalm 33, we are commanded to worship.

Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous.

It is fitting for the upright to praise him.

Praise him with the harp, make music to him on the ten-string lyre, sing to him a new song and play skillfully and shout for joy.

So we're commanded to worship God gladly and loudly, and the reason is given to us in verse 4 where it says, For the word of the Lord is right and true, he is faithful in all he does.

The Lord loves righteousness and justice.

The earth is full of his unfailing love.

So the reason why God is worthy of our worship is because he loves and delights in justice.

We see this also in the books of the prophets, and this comes through in a very pointed way in the prophets, where very often God is announcing a word of judgment that is going to come because there is rampant injustice that is taking place in the world.

And sometimes that injustice takes place in the nations, and sometimes that injustice is taking place within the life of his very own people, and God speaks words of judgment against injustice.

And in Amos chapter 2, verse 7, we're given this announcement of God's coming judgment on his very own people.

Amos 2:7

And the reason is found in verse 7 where it says, They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed.

Then later in the book of Amos, chapter 5, we hear God saying this.

Amos 5 · chapter mention

In verse 21, he says, I hate, I despise your religious festivals, your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs, I will not listen to the music of your harps, but let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream.

So because God's people are not also living justly, God says he hates their religious observance, because it has become mere religious observance.

We could go on and on in many other places in the Bible, which speak with a unified voice saying the same thing.

It's who he is.

That's God's nature and his character.

Now, if God is not just, that presents a problem for us.

Because if God is not just, we would all say he is not worthy of our worship.

A God who is not just, who can't or won't do what is right in every case, he's not worthy of our worship.

But let me suggest that if God is just, we have an even bigger problem.

And that's what we see in this next point.

So we have to look upwards to God, and as we look up to God and look up to what the Bible says, we see He is a God of justice.

But secondly, we need to look inward to ourselves.

There's a professor and philosopher named Jacob Needleman who wrote this book.

It's called Why Can't We Be Good?

And uh in this book, what he does is he uh he correctly identifies an inescapable human problem.

And that human problem is, if you can't tell by the title, we can't be good.

The inescapable human problem that he identifies is that we are not capable of doing even the things that we know are good and right and true.

And he says it's not a Christian thing, it's not a religious thing, this is a human thing.

So listen to how he says this.

He says this in a way that I just find I think it's very, very skillful.

He says, consider all our attempts to be good, decent people.

Consider our moral laws, our golden rules, our laws and rules of civilization, and then consider the crimes we commit.

The crimes of humanity, the violation of children, the torture, the destruction, the genocide, the rape, and the deception, the preaching of murderous ideology.

Can we really believe any of that is under human control?

What awesome hypnotic force of self-deception enables us to adopt our moral principles in the belief that we will be able to live them.

What a monstrous deception of ourselves by ourselves.

You see what he's saying here.

He's saying we've got the you know the golden rule, and every religious system has the golden rule, and every single person out there has what they would say is like this is this is the moral code that I live by.

Here's all the things that I say everyone must and ought to live this way.

And his point is that none of us can actually live according to even our own ideals.

None of us can actually do what we believe is good and right and true on a consistent basis.

So he correctly identifies the problem, but what he misses is he misses the root cause.

The root cause has been communicated to us in the Bible long before Jacob Niedleman came along or wrote this book.

The Bible identifies that problem, the core of that problem, the root cause, is this.

We are born into a battle with sin.

The Bible says that by nature, every single one of us, from the moment we are born, are separated from God, our Creator, in relationship.

The Bible says that we are born into this world spiritually dead, lifeless.

And as a result of that, we choose a path of death and destruction, and that impacts and influences both our lives and the lives of the people around us.

That is who we are.

Apart from God's miraculous and divine intervention, the Bible says that we all are a cocktail of distorted emotions and tainted motives and self-interested actions.

Allow me to say something that uh I know is hard to hear, but I think is really helpful just to name out loud, and it's this we are the reason the world is the way it is.

Collective, we humans, when we look around and see the evil and injustice around us, the world is the way it is because of us.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that we're all awful, terrible people, and that we can't do anything good, and that we're as corrupt and as terrible as we could be.

I'm not saying that.

In fact, uh most of us in this room would say, you know, I I've experienced the grace and the mercy and the forgiveness of God, and by his grace and in the power of his spirit, I'm not the person I was before.

And my life is different, and I'm now able to choose a path of life the way God has designed it.

But even still, every single one of us who has been made alive in Christ still lives in a daily war and battle with sin.

Every single one of us still is incapable of every time doing the things we know to be good and right and true.

And so can I just suggest this morning that, you know, we we look around uh at the evil and injustice in our world, and uh our instinct so often is to blame God.

Is to say, God, where are you?

God, what are you doing?

God, why don't you intervene?

And that is uh that is a legitimate question, by the way.

I want to be clear about that.

But can I just suggest uh maybe the problem isn't with God?

Maybe the problem isn't with him.

Maybe instead of shaking our fists at the sky, we should take a good long look in the mirror and recognize that the world is the way it is because of people like us.

Here's why the justice of God is not good news for us.

For God to deal with the evil in the world, God has to deal with us.

For God to eradicate and to destroy what is evil in our world, He would have to eradicate and destroy us who are tainted and corrupted by sin, who are the source of so much evil and injustice in our world.

We are unholy, we are corrupted by sin, and we will stand before God and give an Account to one whose holiness will consume anything and everyone who is unholy.

And so there's there's a part of us that's like, man, we need God to be a God of justice.

We couldn't stand it if God wasn't just.

But also it creates a problem for us because if God is going to deal with the evil in the world, God has to also deal with us.

So his justice is actually not good news for us, which is why we can't stop here.

We can't just see that he's a God of justice and then look at ourselves and recognize that we are the source of so much evil and injustice in the world.

We have to lastly look to the cross.

As we look to the cross, what we see is that he is just.

What we see is that our sin matters, that he takes our sin seriously, that he will not simply sweep our sin under the rug and pretend it never existed.

We see that he is a God who is just and the cross also shows us that he is merciful and he is kind and he is loving.

See, the Bible says that our sin deserves eternal death and separation from God.

And if that's the case, he would be entirely justified in condemning us all to that fate.

But he is not just a God of justice, he is also a God who loves us.

He's a God who's merciful and who's kind and has made a way for us to be cleansed from our sin and brought back into relationship with him.

He's made a way for us to experience newness of life so that we can walk on a new path.

In Jesus, God took on human flesh and came into a world that is ravaged by evil and injustice.

God took on human flesh and came into a world that is ravaged by evil and injustice, and he did not stay a spectator to it.

He didn't just sort of stand off in the corner and observe it from a distance.

No, Jesus experienced evil and injustice himself.

Judas Iscariot was one of Jesus' own twelve apprentices who Jesus had spent three years investing in him, and Judas decided that Jesus' life was worth less than 30 pieces of silver.

And so he went to the religious leaders and agreed for a small sum of money to betray Jesus and to hand him over so he could be executed.

When John writes in his gospel about this, he says that what Judas did was not just evil, it was not just wicked, it was demonic.

It was satanically inspired what he did to Jesus.

And then as Jesus is on trial, he's standing there before Pilate, and Pilate's like, guys, he didn't do anything that's worthy of him being condemned to death.

But then the religious leaders put an enormous amount of social and political pressure on Pilate to have Jesus executed anyways.

That's an injustice.

And then what ends up happening is that Barabbas, someone who was a convicted known murderer who was worthy of being detained, was set scot-free, and Jesus, who is an innocent man, who is the innocent man, was condemned to be tortured and executed as a form of capital punishment.

So Jesus experienced the worst that our world has to offer.

He experienced the height of evil and he experienced the height of injustice.

He experienced that so that through faith and what he has done for us on the cross, we could be united to him so that we could be forgiven of our sin and have the power to choose a new path.

The good news is that salvation is available for us.

Salvation is possible because Jesus subjected himself to evil and to injustice.

He did so for us.

So does God even care about evil and injustice?

The resounding answer of the Bible is yes.

He does care about evil.

He does care about injustice.

The Bible says that he saw his creation ravaged by the effects of evil and injustice.

This good creation that he dreamed up and in his divine wisdom created, this good, beautiful, perfect thing was shattered by evil and injustice.

We see that he saw his image bearers who've been reeling under the weight of evil and injustice and under the weight and power of sin.

He saw us, and his heart was moved to compassion.

So yes, he cares about evil, and yes, he cares about injustice.

He subjected himself to evil and injustice.

The stuff we created and brought into the world.

And he did so so that we could have the promise of a restored world, a new creation where evil and injustice are no more and are gone forever.

So does God care about evil and injustice?

The answer is yes, he does care about evil and injustice.

He cares so deeply that he did something about it.

Now we don't know why God chooses not to intervene more than he does.

We're sort of back to the same question that we started with.

And the answer, the the reality is we don't know the answer to that question in full of why God doesn't do more and why God doesn't intervene more.

But we do know what kind of God He is.

We do know that He's the kind of God who can take even evil and injustice.

And he can make them work together for and even contribute towards and advance his good purposes in the world.

These verses that we read from Genesis chapter 50, this is the last part of the story of Joseph's life.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

And if we were to go back and look at the whole story over again, we would see that Joseph experienced evil and injustice at the hands of his brothers who wanted to kill him and then decided, well, maybe we shouldn't kill him.

We'll just sell him into slavery.

So his life is effectively done, but he has to live with it.

He experienced evil and injustice from his brothers as well as from other people in his life.

And at this point, his brothers didn't expect to be reunited with them, and they're sitting there like, oh my goodness, he's going to kill us because he's the second in command in Egypt, and we're here desperate because there's a famine and we don't have any food, and he's gonna just, he's gonna take out his wrath on us and have us killed.

And Joseph can look back over his life and say to his brothers what he says here.

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

He says, You intended this for evil.

And yet I can look back and see how God is taking even these evil, awful things and the injustices that have been committed, and I can see how God is making them turn out for the good of his people.

In other words, he's saying, the things you did were evil.

They were inexcusable.

But we have a God who can take those things and make them turn out for good.

And what we see in Joseph, we see to an even greater degree in the person of Jesus.

In the cross, where we see that Jesus, like Joseph, was abandoned and betrayed by his brothers and those who are closest to him.

Jesus experienced greater evil and greater injustice than even Joseph experienced.

The cross was an inexcusable, horrendous act of evil.

And the cross is the very thing that God used to accomplish our deliverance and to accomplish our salvation.

It wasn't a bad thing that God had to somehow make work together and pick up the pieces of it.

No, this awful, evil, horrendous thing was used by God for the advancement of his purposes.

Again, we don't know the answers to why God doesn't intervene and do more things to stop evil and to stop injustice in our world.

We don't know the answer to those questions.

But we do know what kind of God He is.

We know that He is just, we know that He cares.

We know that He loves us.

And so as we wrestle with questions of the goodness of God and the presence of evil and injustice in our world, we have to filter everything that we feel when we ask those questions.

And we have to filter the lack of clear and tangible Bible verses that tell us, oh, this is why God does it this way.

We have to filter all of those things through what we know to be true about who God is.

And the Bible makes it very clear that He is good, that He loves us, that He is just, that He cares about suffering and evil that has been committed.

And the good news of the cross is that because of what Jesus has done for us, evil and injustice will not have the last word.

Each Sunday we come to the communion table, and this is a chance for us to remember and to celebrate what God has done for us in Jesus.

And as we come today, we are reminded.

We are reminded that God cares deeply about sin.

He cares deeply about evil and about injustice.

He's not indifferent towards it.

He was willing to step into our world and to experience evil and injustice for us.

So that we could have new life, so that we could experience new life here, and so that we could have the hope and the promise of restored creation, where evil and injustice will be done away with forever.

And so as we come to the communion table, we get to remember and celebrate what God has done for us through Jesus.

I invite you to take just a few moments of silence for confession and reflection, and then we will come to the communion table together.