Know God: No Justice! If God is Good, Why Do Bad Things Happen? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medicurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medicurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life, that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I want to welcome you to week three of our Know God series.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

We are in a series where we are asking the real fundamental questions of our faith and of Christianity, having real conversations around them.

For far too often, the church at large has shied away from the big questions of whether or not God exists and where did the universe come from.

And do we have any reason to believe that Jesus actually rose again?

And we've been taking those questions head on in this series.

And maybe you came up in a church environment where you asked these very legitimate questions and you were told to just, you know, have more faith and follow along and don't question God, which is another way of saying just blindly believe and take everything at face value that we tell you.

And we don't believe that is biblical faith, that the word for faith in the Greek that is used in the Bible actually means to be convinced by argument.

And so we experience God, that's experiential faith, and we also seek God, and that is our reasoned faith.

And both of those together can give you a firm foundation when you're lacking in one area or the other, you can easily be thrown off guard.

In week one, we put up some arguments for theism, the existence of God.

And in week two, we looked at the resurrection of Jesus to see if that God is the God of the Bible.

Now, there's a lot of content in this series, and so I'm not just preaching on Sundays, I'm streaming Wednesday nights at 7 p.m.

on MetaCurch's YouTube channel and on our Facebook page.

We're calling that overtime to invite you to join us for that.

And then we're putting all of that content together in one easy place at metachurch.tv slash know God.

That's metachurch.tv slash K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

So if you are walking in to week three, this message hopefully will make sense on its own.

But if you want the big picture, you can go to that website and get totally caught up.

Today, we're moving into the biggest objection today to the existence of God.

My message today is no justice.

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

Would you pray with me?

Father, we are tackling a very difficult subject today.

We are looking into a reality that we all feel at the core of our being that something is wrong in the world around us.

We all suffer and we all experience pain, and we can even wonder where you are at in the midst of all of that.

I pray that you would just expand our view today, and we would get a deeper look at who you are, your character, your love for us.

God, I thank you for MetaCurch, a place where people can come on all different parts of their faith journey from the seasoned believer to the hardcore skeptic.

And I ask that since we're here, that we would be humble enough to lay down any presuppositions we've carried in, to allow you to speak to us.

You've told us if we seek you, we will find you.

So that's what we're doing today, and we ask for help in that endeavor.

We love you, and we pray this in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to get going, say amen.

Amen.

This isn't one of those sermons where I really have to convince you of the problem that we're trying to address.

The world is full of suffering.

You know that because you have suffered.

And these are the questions that we hear.

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

Why is there suffering in the world?

Why is there so much pain?

Why is evil so prevalent?

Why is there so much devastation and tragedies?

Life is not fair.

We know this.

We know this on some really superficial levels, you know?

Like all the other people like me in the room who knew you were gonna be in the NBA and then never broke six foot.

It's like, come on, life is not fair.

All of you trying to build a brand on Instagram, you can't get 10 likes, and somehow every Kardashian is famous.

Life's not fair, you know?

Rob Kardashian's famous.

How do we not have a shot at this?

Life isn't fair, and yet we can go down and down the layers to the very core of who we are.

And we always say this, and it's important that suffering is scalable because everyone has suffered, and chances are everyone is suffering at some level.

And there's kind of this temptation, especially in church circles, to compare your story to the worst story imaginable and convince yourself that you haven't suffered at all.

It's like, well, you know, I wasn't like born under a bridge and lived on the streets and was a heroin addict since I was three and won a bunch of money and lost it all in a night.

So, really, I don't have anything to complain about.

It's like suffering is scalable.

And so don't diminish what you have been through by comparing it to someone else.

Maybe your suffering looked a little bit different.

Maybe second grade was the first time that someone pointed out a physical flaw that you have, and that one moment took the pin and has authored your life from that moment forward.

Suffering is scalable, some of you know the depths of suffering.

You've been through abandonment, you've been through abuse.

Things that changed and have controlled your life ever since.

The world is a tough place.

Good people get taken advantage of, and bad people often rise to the top of society.

Missionaries die of cancer while criminals win the lottery.

Sometimes it feels like you can't get a break, but the people who are way more immoral than you around you continue to get the promotions, they get the spouse, they drive the car you want to drive, live in the neighborhood you want to live in.

Life is tough.

And this is a question that we have to be able to answer because there's a group of guys, they're called the new atheists, and there's nothing new about what they believe or their form of atheism.

They've just repackaged it.

They become masters at you know, YouTube and social media, they've written best-selling books.

And this argument, the argument against God from suffering, is the number one argument that they leverage.

It is their safety net.

You know, we've gone through some arguments, like in week one, we talked about the cosmological argument.

Atheists have this big problem, right?

Because the Big Bang shows us that before the universe there was nothing.

No space, no time, no matter.

And so, where did all of this come from?

That's a really big problem.

And if they get pushed into a corner by the cosmological argument or the teleological argument or the argument for morality, they have the argument for suffering to fall back from.

All right, I'll give you all that.

Your God's the creator, he came down to earth, his name was Jesus, he died and rose again.

I have a question for you then.

If that God is so good and he's all loving, why is there so much evil, pain, and suffering in the world?

They become masters at this argument, and it's so powerful because it's so felt, it's it's visceral.

We're living it out in our everyday experience.

Another weekend, another mass shooting.

This weekend in Buffalo, motivated by putrid hatred in somebody's heart because of racism.

Unbelievable.

People are suffering around us.

Mothers in our city of San Antonio can't get formula for their children.

The world is so upside down, and yet we have a longing on our heart that things should and could be better.

In this century specifically, there is no argument that has come close to turning as many people away from faith and keeping as many people away from faith.

As believers in Jesus, we must have an answer for this argument out of suffering.

In theological terms, this is what's called a theodicy.

A theodicy is your belief about God, evil, suffering, and pain.

Theodicy answers the question: if God is good, then why do bad things happen?

And like everything else in this series, there are volumes of scholarly work on this one topic.

And what I'm hoping today to do today and in overtime on Wednesday is to distill down the most essential elements of what we actually believe about this.

And to understand it, we're gonna have to understand two cornerstone principles, freedom and justice.

Freedom and justice.

We're gonna look at both of these ideas, and at times it's gonna almost feel like I'm preaching two sermons and one, but I think at the end we will bring it back together and tie it up to help us understand why God is good and why there is suffering in the world.

To understand this, we first have to understand where pain and suffering come from.

And we have to seek to understand God in his own context, which he has revealed to us through the Bible.

The story of God revealed to us takes place in the Genesis account of creation.

This is often called the garden narrative.

It's the very first book of the Bible at the very beginning of that book.

And what the garden narrative does is it gives us this sneak peek into God's original design and his original intention for his world and for us.

This is the way things were supposed to be.

As the narrative goes, God created all of creation.

Last, he created humanity.

Man and woman placed them in the garden, and they were living in actual perfection.

Perfect relationships, endless resources, meaningful work, direct connection and communication with God.

In this actual perfect world, there was one rule.

The rule was that there was one tree, it was near the center of the garden, and they could do anything else they wanted, but they could not eat from that one tree.

One rule.

This is the part of the narrative where we get uncomfortable.

We don't love rules.

It's almost at this point inherent in us.

If you tell me I can't do something, you're making me want to do that thing.

There's two reasons we don't like rules.

The first one's uncomfortable but true.

It's immaturity.

There's a reason that your child will touch that stove.

It's not that they want to, it's you told them not to.

They want to cross the line because the line now exists.

The second reason we don't like rules is ignorance.

We don't understand why rules matter.

Rules matter because rules establish relationship.

God created us out of his great love for us, and he didn't just create us to stand off as a distant God and watch us as some cosmic science experiment.

He created us to be in relationship with him, and relationship requires rules.

Now it's kind of shocking because God could have created 10 rules, he could have created 10,000 rules.

He wanted relationship and he set the lowest bar possible, only one rule.

That tree, you've got to leave that one alone.

What that meant is every day Adam and Eve got to wake up in perfection, see the tree in the center of the garden, and choose God anyway.

When we choose to follow the rules, we choose to stay in relationship.

Relationship establishes rules in our interpersonal relationships.

In your friend group, you may have never listed them out, but you have rules.

If you've ever lost a friend, you know this.

They broke the rules that establish relationship.

In your marriage, you take wedding vows, you are vowing to the rules that establish relationship.

And we don't love this.

Oh, my husband can't put any rules on me.

I like to see my wife try to put some rules on me.

I'm a free man just because I got a ring on now.

Doesn't mean she gets to tell me everything.

Look, there's some rules that establish that relationship.

Like I will cling to you and you only for as long as we both shall live.

That's a rule that, if not followed, will break down your relationship.

Not just interpersonally.

Our world runs on rules that establish relationships.

The natural laws are rules that establish the relationship of how the natural forces in our universe actually work.

Right now it's the NBA playoffs.

The rules of a basketball game establish the relationship between the action you take and the outcome of the game.

If you have ever coached five-year-olds, you know what basketball looks like when no one understands the rules.

If they have a ball and are near a hoop, they're gonna shoot.

Whether it's their hoop or not, right?

They don't understand the rules, so they don't know how to get to the end outcome of winning that game.

Rules establish relationship.

And God wanted relationship with us.

He gave one rule.

And you probably know the story.

That rule was broken.

In Genesis 3, it says the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, and so she took some of its fruit and ate it.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

Now they're living in perfection.

And look at all the flaws that she found.

It was good for food, delightful to look at, desirable for obtaining wisdom.

In a world where by definition she was lacking nothing, she found three things she felt she was lacking.

They ate it, and then the eyes of both of them were open.

That symbolizes losing the innocence that they once had, and they knew they were naked, and so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

They ate the fruit.

And before we get mad at them, we we do the same thing.

God had established a rule, God established rules in our life, and when we sin, which means missing the mark, not living up to his standards, or when we transgress, which means going beyond his standards, breaking those rules, we break the relationship.

This is really important to understand because the first thing it teaches us is that God didn't walk out on us.

That's really important because we have generations of people who are growing up without a father in their home.

Their father walked out on them, and they grow up and they consider faith, and we sing, you're a good, good father.

And they don't know what that means because they never had one of those.

The idea of God as our father is a distant idea to them, and for them, father equates abandonment.

And what you need to understand, and we learn in the garden narrative, is that God gave us a rule because rules establish relationship, but when you break the rule, you break the relationship.

God never walked out on us, we walked out on Him.

The first temptation, the first temptation that got them to eat the fruit was don't you know, you can be just like God.

Maybe this world isn't so perfect.

Maybe God's holding out on you.

Maybe if you were in charge of how the world works, you could make it better than God has made it.

And so we broke relationship with God, and like a good father, he has been pursuing us ever since.

Rules establish relationship, and we don't like rules.

It's like if a billionaire came into your life, took a liking to you, liked what you stood for, liked what you were about, liked your gumption, the vision you have for your future, trusted you, had no kids of his own.

So put you into his will as the sole inheritor.

Maybe he gave you one rule.

All you gotta do is visit me once a month.

One rule, could be any rule.

As long as you follow the rule, you establish the relationship.

And what happens when you break the rule?

You break the relationship.

When you break the relationship, you lose access to the blessing.

When we broke the relationship with God, the consequences were far more dire because God isn't just some distant billionaire.

God is the source of all that is good.

The world fell into chaos.

Almost immediately, brother turned on brother, filled him in cold blood.

All of the problems that we see, all of the chaos from sin entering the world, not through God, through our action and separating ourselves from God.

Children disrespect parents.

Parents abandoned children, governments grew tyrannical, addictions overtook our lives.

The suffering that entered the world entered through sin and transgression, breaking the rules that break relationship.

And so the question that the new atheists will leverage against this part of our theodicy, what we believe about why there is suffering in the world, is why would God design a world like that?

Why not make a world where there was no chance for evil?

Why not make a world where there was no chance for immorality?

You're telling me that God can speak the whole universe out of nothing, but He can't create a world where there isn't any bad?

Why?

This brings us back to the first temptation, the temptation that Adam and Eve fell into is what if you could be like God?

The real question that we're asking is, why didn't God make the world any different?

It's kind of akin to saying, if I was God, here's how I would have done things.

And so let's consider it.

What are the possible worlds that God could have made and what are the implications that fall from those worlds?

The first option is God could have made no world.

We know that prior to the Big Bang, there was nothing.

There was no space, no time, no matter.

That's a scientifically verified fact.

So there was nothing.

If God existed in that nothingness, he could have stopped before he ever got started.

Just create no world.

That's an option.

One option is this world.

A world where there is love and beauty and a lot of positive things and tremendous suffering and evil and pain, like we all experience.

There is potentially an option where God creates this world, but with no capacity for moral evil.

This world, but no capacity for moral evil.

Hypothetically, that is a possible world.

The only problem is you and I would not be here to observe it.

You see, when lions hunt, it is savage, it's malicious, but when they catch their prey, we don't call it murder.

When zebras mate, there is certainly no consent.

It's quite violent.

And yet we don't call it rape.

Morality is tied to conscious creatures.

Conscious creatures create immorality.

And if there is a world where there is no capacity for moral evil, it just means it's this world minus us.

It's one option, it's not one that I love personally, you know?

It sounds good on paper, but then the pinnacle of God's creation never exists.

And then there is the world that people are actually pushing for.

This is the world that the new atheists put forward, and they can't wrap their mind around why God wouldn't have done this if God exists.

They think they want God to have created a world with humans, but just take out of those humans the capacity for immoral action, sin, transgressions, or evil.

And wouldn't that be perfect?

A world with no suffering, a world with no evil, a world where we never do any wrong.

Wouldn't that be the perfect world?

And the answer is no.

For God to remove our freedom from us is for God to remove the greatest ontological gift.

That means a gift that we are born with.

It's a part of our nature.

The greatest ontological gift that He gave us.

He gave us our freedom.

There is a hypothetical world where God could create us as robots and pre-program us to always get it right, to never eat the fruit, to always be kind, to always follow God's rules.

There is a world, hypothetically, where God could puppet us throughout our life in a theistic, deterministic, God-determining every action, every thought, every moment of your life.

But here's what you need to know in that world where there is no immorality, there is also no morality, because morality is based on choice.

In that world where you would perfectly obey God, there would be no obedience, because obedience that is coerced is simply slavery.

In that world, there would be no love because love without choice is not love at all.

If you believe in God, the greatest gift that He gave us inherently in us.

Our greatest gift is salvation that we put choose with our free will to put our faith in Jesus.

The greatest gift that we are born with is our freedom.

According to Scripture, God's revelation to us, we have freedom because we were made in the image of God.

It sets us apart from the plants who simply have their biology.

And we love biology, but it's more than biology.

It's not just the animals where we just have our instinct.

It's more than our wiring.

We have actual free choice.

We get to make real decisions.

We get to see the tree every day and choose whether or not we will stay in relationship or whether we will break the rules that establish that relationship.

And without that choice, you cannot have relationship, you cannot have morality, and you cannot have love.

Why did God create something instead of nothing?

He did it because God is love.

Why did God create rules?

Because he loves you and wanted a relationship with you.

Why did he create you free?

Because love requires freedom.

Love requires freedom.

This is a big statement, but this is what that means.

That God wanted relationship with you even more than he wanted you to obey.

God could have created you.

Look, God can do whatever he wants.

Eve could have gotten within 10 feet of that tree and just shot collar out of nowhere.

God can do whatever he wants.

And God gave us freedom.

Because God created us out of love and God created us for love.

Rules establish relationship, and love requires freedom.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Love requires freedom, including the freedom to break the rules that establish the relationship.

God sees the end from the beginning.

And yet, in his love, he made us anyway.

The creation separated itself from the creator, and why are we surprised at the level of suffering that has come?

God, the source of all that is good and holy in the world, did not walk out on us.

We walked out on Him.

Rules establish relationship and love requires freedom.

That is the simplest way to explain our theodicy.

Why God is good, why God is loved, and why there is suffering in the world.

And yet, the question remains is that just we have some level of understanding of freedom, why freedom matters, because love requires it, but we have to understand freedom and justice.

You see, what the new atheists do is they claim that God allowing bad things to happen is a violation of the very justice that that God is supposed to be the standard for.

The question is, is that true?

And to understand that, we have to know what exactly justice is.

Here's the simplest and most accurate definition.

Justice is getting what you deserve and not getting what you do not deserve.

Justice is getting what you deserve and not getting the things that you do not deserve.

I want you to notice something about this definition.

This definition cannot exist in a vacuum.

It must be informed by your worldview because your worldview tells you who deserves what.

Now we use the word justice and we generally know what we mean.

Justice has a bedrock principle, which is the value, dignity, and equality of all people in all places.

That is the bedrock of justice.

And that assumes some things.

Things like upward mobility, equal opportunity in education and career, fair treatment by social institutions and your fellow humans.

Justice is rooted in the value and dignity of all people.

And that form of justice, that idea of justice, it seems seared into our hearts and into our minds.

This is what we march for.

These are the causes that tear at us, that move us to action.

We want justice.

But justice requires a worldview.

And the question is, what worldview actually maps out the kind of justice that we are seeking?

What I want us to do quickly is I want us to go through the four primary worldviews that exist.

There are many, many nuanced worldviews, but almost all of them, if not all of them, fall under these four broad categories.

The categories are work-based, works-based religion, the karmic cycle, atheism and Christianity.

Works-based religion, the karmic cycle, atheism and Christianity.

Let's look first at works-based religion.

We're looking for a foundation to build justice on top of.

In works-based religion, you are separated from God.

Some of them because you fell from God or you sinned and separated yourself.

Other religions, you started separated from God because who in the world are you anyway?

And he's God, so good luck.

In a works-based religion, you have to live your life climbing the ladder between you and God.

In these situations, you can almost never, almost never know how you're doing.

By default, every works-based religion, which is every religion outside of biblical Christianity.

And I say that very carefully, because there are many strains of religion who have added back in works, thereby destroying the major unique factor of Christianity among the world religions.

Every non-biblical world religion is works-based, and they are all rooted in fear.

That's a real problem because we look historically and sociologically and we know what fear does.

Fear fractures.

In fear-based systems, people find their in-group.

And with their in-group, they defend against anyone and everyone else.

Not only does it not bring people together in equality, but it further distances people one from another.

Works-based religion, as hard as it might try, ultimately cannot sustain the kind of justice that we are looking for.

Islam is probably the most stringent form of a works-based religion.

On Islam, the only way to be assured that you will end up in paradise is to die on behalf of Allah.

That's it.

Short of that, you are left fearfully wondering whether or not you've made the cut.

The second major worldview is the karmic cycle.

This is largely the Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, and yet the idea of karma has over time really crept into the Western thought or Western zeitgeist.

This is something you're now hearing a lot more about, even in popular culture here in America.

The karmic principle is that throughout life, you store up a debt of the wrongs you've done and a reserve of the goods that you've done.

And at some point, you will receive back the bad things for the bad things you've done in your life, and you will receive back good things for the good things that you've done in your life.

They'll be weighed one against another to determine your outcome.

Now, that kind of sounds like justice, getting what you deserve and not getting what you don't deserve.

But when you really dig into the karmic cycle, you'll find it's anything but that.

For example, if you were stealing things from work, you know, like maybe it was big things and maybe it was small things, like you just stole enough post-it notes to equate to, you know, a few hundred dollars or whatever else.

Justice would be you getting fired from that job.

Injustice would be you getting promoted because of doing something like that.

On the karmic cycle, maybe nothing happens.

And then 40 years later, you get cancer and die.

Now the question is, is dying from cancer a just result of stealing some paper clips?

And the answer is, of course not.

But that's not how the karmic cycle works.

It adds up things over time.

And so it's not just the things you stole from work, it's also the kid you bullied in second grade, and it's the time you talk back to your parents in sixth grade, and it's the time you cheated on your girlfriend in high school, and it's all the times you looked at pornography as an adult, and it all adds up, and then in the end, you finally receive your judgment.

Now there's another problem with the karmic cycle, which is that some people go their whole life and seemingly get away with living in complete immorality.

The karmic cycle has an answer for that.

It's called reincarnation.

This is when you are born again, not spiritually, like we believe in Christianity, but literally, physically born again to live a new life on the earth.

And here's how the karmic cycle worked.

If you were bad in your previous life, then you will be born into hard circumstances.

If karma is accurate and you're going through a tough season, maybe you've never been able to get a leg up in life, you were born in poverty, you developed some addictions really early, you haven't been able to kick them, you're not able to sustain relationships, you're not good with your money.

On karma, what that means is that in a previous life that you have no recollection of and no control over, you were bad, and now you are paying the price for a life that you never really lived.

That's the furthest thing from justice.

It has even more implications because on the Eastern religions, what you'll find is they don't have mercy ministries, they don't do social action.

There was a hundred of you who showed up to the food bank yesterday.

We sorted like 20,000 pounds of food, we provided like 14,000 meals, we did that because we believe in being the hands and feet of God.

Jesus' life showed us that the more vulnerable and marginalized someone is, the more we are supposed to stand in the gap for them.

That's how we show the love of God to a hurting world.

On the karmic cycle, what you'll find in the Eastern religions is people live in a caste system.

It's the same thing that we used to have in the class system.

There's upper class, middle class, lower class.

Where you are, you will stay forever.

And if you are lower class, it's because you are paying off the karmic debt from a previous life.

And what that means is if someone from the middle class or the upper class were to come in and lend a helping hand, it wouldn't be good, it would be evil because they would be disrupting the karmic cycle.

Instead of justice, you get just wait.

We don't have to lift a finger, karma will take care of justice for us.

Even today, people are writing books like Rethinking Buddhism, trying to steal worldviews from Christianity to add in social action to the Eastern religions.

On the karmic cycle, you simply cannot get the mapping for the kind of justice that we are looking for today.

The third worldview is atheism.

There is nothing that has as much momentum in the West as atheism.

It is growing by leaps and bounds.

Now it is the new atheists who will stand and point their finger in God's face and say, this is not just.

And yet, the question is, where do you get justice on atheism?

On atheism, you came from nothing.

Your purpose is nothing, your destination after this life is nothing.

This world is full of nothing but pitiless indifference.

The universe was not started with a plan, it is being guided by no one, and it will have no just means.

If your life is hard, the universe doesn't care.

If you are suffering, the cosmos is indifferent.

There is nothing outside of us, and there is nothing to tell us whether your suffering is bad and your flourishing is good.

On atheism, there is simply no foundation for justice.

Justice demands that you determine who deserves what.

And the universe, as our only source of standard, doesn't care.

We're looking for where justice comes from.

And when you remove a creator, you remove something that is outside of us, outside of space and time, that acts as an objective anchor to determine morality, equality, reason, and all the other component parts that make up the justice we are looking for.

Now, this may sound insane, and I realize hardly any atheists live this way.

They live like their life has purpose.

They live like this whole thing is going somewhere.

They live like morality and equality matter.

And you can live like that as an atheist.

It just means you're stealing those ideas from a different worldview.

Postmodern relativist and atheistic philosopher Richard Royti admits this.

He says the idea of universal human rights was a completely novel concept in history, resting on the biblical teaching that all human beings are created in the image of God.

This atheistic philosopher who is intellectually honest enough to know that in the entire scope of history, the idea of equality comes first and foremost from the Bible.

The reason that we live in a world where we value all races, all genders, all classes as equal before God is because God came down to earth and hung on a cross equally for all people in all places.

It is the starting place in all of history for the equality that we're looking for.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the grandfather of atheism, the one who started modern atheism, he said this: another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity.

The concept of the equality of souls before God.

This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.

Richard Rorty, the atheist philosopher, calls himself a free loading atheist.

He does believe there's morality, he does believe in justice, he does believe in purpose and life.

He is free loading because he admits he steals all of those ideas, not from his worldview, but from the Christian worldview.

You see, we tend to have this very ahistorical view of human history.

We think that before the modern world, everyone was just thriving.

You know, before all this technology ruined everything, before all of this advancement separated us all and made us all hate each other.

That is such an ahistorical view of human history.

We know that the greatest moral stain on our country's conscience is slavery that lasted for way too long.

Segregation lasted way too long after that.

We said all men are created with inherent rights, and it took us forever to know that all men means all men.

And yet, when we stop and think that was unique to us, and that everything before 1776 or 1619 was just flourishing, we have this picture of the pre-modern man and women.

The men went out and hunted, and the women went out and picked the berries, and then everyone from all tribes got together and shared a beautiful feast.

That is a caricature of history.

It is so far removed from the truth that it is shocking that we live with that belief.

The entirety of human history was divided among racial, class, and gender lines.

The entirety of human history, with very few exceptions, women were second-class citizens, at best, property as more of the normalcy in human history.

Different races either conquered each other or ignored each other so they could finally have some peace.

Everyone, everyone existed on a class-based system, and if you were lower class, you were worth less.

Human history is unbelievably brutal.

And yet, today, seared on our hearts and our minds, is the idea of justice.

It's a belief that is so deep within the fiber of our being that we swear it must be a self-evident truth that all people are equal.

Where did that belief come from and what is the foundation for it?

We've gone through three-quarters of our worldviews.

It's a very bleak picture so far, but we have one left, and I'm calling this Jesus.

I wanted to call it Christianity, but Christians have done such a bad job of actually representing their Christ that it can just give atheists ammunition to destroy us before we even get our arguments started.

This worldview started with Jesus.

The Reverend Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

summarized in one sentence the foundation of every march for every cause, birthed out of every burden on the hearts of modern people when he said, every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.

The Constitution would phrase it.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created with certain unalienable rights.

This is a belief that we share today, but you need to know this idea is new.

In human history, this idea is new.

Tom Holland, not the guy that plays Spider-Man, different Tom Holland, a historian who specializes in ancient Greek and ancient Rome, one of my favorite historians.

He didn't believe in Jesus.

He believed in him as a historical figure, but he didn't believe in him as God in human flesh.

He studied Rome as deeply as anyone could study it.

He studied ancient Greek as deep as anyone could could study it.

And what he found was a brutal life.

A life where you would not want to be a minority, you would not want to be a woman, you would not want to be anything short of a rich, aristocratic man.

Everyone else's life was hell on earth all of the time, 365 days a year.

This is how everything functioned.

And then, as he studied it, things began to change.

And as he got closer and closer to the present day, what he found is a belief that not only became held of the dignity and worth of every person, it became held so tightly by so many people that it appeared as the natural course of events.

And yet, every time he traced every path back, they all led to Jesus.

Tom Holland became a believer because he saw undeniable evidence how Jesus changed history forever.

He says this in his book, Dominion, that every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth.

A Roman would have laughed at it.

The origins of this principle lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment.

The principle of equality of people is found in the Bible.

Before Jesus and the movement he started, all there was was work-based religion, the karmic cycle, and atheism.

And none of those can lay a foundation for the justice that we are seeking after.

And it was in this context of a divided, racist, classist, sexist world that a Galilean carpenter named Jesus began preaching something new.

Jesus came, he died.

His believers believe he resurrected from the grave.

We believe that at Metachurch.

He started a movement that changed the world forever.

In the book of Acts, it tells the history of the early church.

The followers of Jesus showed up, and look at what the people from the outside thought.

In verse 6, it says, These men who have turned the world upside down have now come here too.

Everything we thought, our worldview, how we thought about dignity, how we thought about nations, how we thought about gender, these men have turned the world upside down, and they did it.

A verse that changed human history forever.

He said, There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female.

Since you are all one, you are all equal in Christ Jesus.

You can search all of the documents of all of ancient history, and you will not find any idea like this until Galatians 3, 28 and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

To put it simply, no Jesus, no justice.

And so what is happening when the new atheists stand, point their finger in the face of God and call him unjust.

What they're actually doing is they are standing on the foundation of justice that Jesus built in order to condemn Jesus himself.

They are standing on a foundation that would not exist without Christianity in order to shout down the God of Christianity.

The Bible doesn't try to pretend like the world isn't incredibly screwed up.

It's very honest.

In just one book, the book of Romans, Romans 3.23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

6.23, the wages of that sin, what we earn from that sin is death, separation from our creator.

Romans 8, for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it.

In the hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God's children.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now.

Death, futility, decay.

An entire planet groaning, longing for redemption and rescue.

So you have a couple of options.

There is no God, which means there is no justice, there is no plan, there's no one guiding this or overseeing it.

There was no intentional beginning, there will be no justice in the end.

The world is just full of pitiless indifference, and our only hope is that the sun will hurry up and get hot enough to get us all out of this miserable condition.

Or God is God.

And he had a plan that allowed us to maintain our freedom, his greatest gift to us, while giving us a solution to the pain that breaking the rules that establish relationship has caused.

We all suffer.

And the question is, is there any meaning in your suffering?

If there isn't something outside of us, if there isn't a grand plan, then your suffering is what it is.

My least favorite expression.

I don't know, man, it is what it is.

Life is hard.

I don't know.

It is what it is.

Jesus came to show you it is what it isn't.

He came to show you that your suffering is more than it seems.

When Jesus came and went to a cross, he proved that the greatest injustice, the first and only actually innocent human being killed for our sins.

He got what he did not deserve, and we did not get what we do deserve.

It is injustice in totality.

He showed and proved that the greatest suffering of Jesus on the cross can also have the greatest redemption.

God wants to use your suffering.

We don't believe that God caused your suffering.

God created a world as he intended it, and yet, because he loved us, he created something instead of nothing.

Because he loved us, he established rules so we could be in relationship.

Because he loved us, he created us free, able to reciprocate that love back.

Because he loved us, he allowed our freedom to break the rules that establish relationship.

And because he loved us, he never stopped pursuing us.

We are the prodigals who have run into the far country, and he is the Father who is always, always, always after you.

This is not works-based religion.

It's not about you cleaning up and getting right and making your way to God.

God knew you wouldn't make it, so he came down for you in the ultimate act of injustice.

A perfect God hung on a Roman cross to pay the price of our sins.

God is just, and justice requires judgment.

And the judgment of my sin is separation from my creator.

But God is more than just.

He's taken it away by nailing it to a cross.

Rules establish relationship, and love requires freedom.

Even the freedom to break the rules that establish relationship.

And when we break those rules, God makes a way for us to come back into relationship.

He offers us forgiveness.

When we break the rules, there's a price to pay, and Jesus paid that price for us.

There's a lot to fear in life.

We fear death.

Even in the midst of suffering, you have nothing to fear if you have Jesus.

This is no longer about you keeping the rules.

Jesus came and kept them for you.

It's about you putting your faith in the one who could keep them perfectly.

We will fail and we will suffer.

But we have the opportunity to fail forward, to fail towards mission, to fail towards purpose.

We are imperfect people, but we have the perfect spirit of God living inside of us.

God will use suffering, suffering He didn't create, but that He allowed in a world of freedom, and He will use it to shape you and refine you and make you like the precious silver, the precious gold that requires the hottest flames that can be purpose in a life of suffering.

In the hands of a God who loves you.

You'll notice one thing that is conspicuously missing from the question if God is good, why do bad things happen?

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

What's missing?

It's us.

We sinned.

God didn't transgress, we transgressed.

The question really is: in a world where people do bad things, how does a good God respond?

A good God responds by coming down, not just talking a big game about his love, but proving it by walking in the midst of our suffering and dying.

To once in all say, All that you owe, all that you've caused, from all the rules you've broken, I've taken care of it all.

It is finished.

God is love and love requires freedom.

God is just and justice requires judgment, and yet God's love, his preeminent characteristic, shows that his mercy for us triumphs even over his judgment.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

We thank you for loving us.

I pray you would help hurting hearts believe that you do love us.

You love us in spite of the suffering that we see, you love us in spite of the pain that we're in.

The very reason that there is suffering is the reason we should give our lives to you.

There is suffering because of our freedom.

There is freedom because of how much you love us.

God, I've broken the rules too many times to count, and yet you have sent the one who took all of the rules upon himself.

I pray, God, that we would just even crack open that door to who you might be, to allow ourselves to experience you.

We're not here to prove you, God.

We're here to open our hearts and allow you to prove yourself.

We thank you for your mercy.

We pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.