Q&A : Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People? | Scott Newman | Part 2 of 6

So glad that you're joining us, both those of you here in the room and those watching online or on demand at some point.

We are uh in the second week of a series that Matt, our lead pastor, kicked off for us last week that we're calling QA.

So, this is where we took your questions, uh, the things that you've always wondered about God, about the Bible, about life, about faith.

And we're answering some of the biggest questions, the most common questions that we got over these next several weeks.

So it was on the morning of December 26, 2004, that one of the most deadly events probably in all of our lifetimes happened.

So at 8 a.m.

local time, uh, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

And what it did was it unleashed this gigantic tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

I mean, waves as high as 100 feet tall in some places, ended up killing around a quarter of a million people across 14 countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka.

I mean, it was just a disaster.

So I was living in India at the time, uh, though where I was in Kolkata, uh, we were completely unaffected, thankfully.

But over the course of that Sunday, it happened on a Sunday morning, over the course of that Sunday, as the scale of the death and destruction became clear, the missions agency that I was with mobilized all their workers in the region to immediately be part of the relief effort.

So two days after the tsunami hit, Katie and I found ourselves on the beaches of a city in in southern India called Chennai, where they were still at the time pulling bodies out of the water and the sand and the rubble.

I mean, it was just, it was a crazy situation.

And it's a massive understatement to say that being there in the midst of all of that was overwhelming.

I mean, overwhelming is putting it lightly.

I mean, we saw steel reinforced concrete buildings wiped clean down to their foundations by the force of these waves.

And then all up and down the coast of India were these fishing villages where people just live with their families in wood huts.

And in many cases, there was there was absolutely nothing left of these villages but scrap wood.

And that's really what was so chilling because all of that scrap wood, they used to be homes.

I mean, families used to live there.

And who could stand a chance against those waves when all you have to protect you is just some wood sticks in the sand.

So everywhere we went as we were there, there were the there were people, men, women, kids, sitting on the side of the road with just that that thousand-yard stare in their eyes, right?

Just completely shell-shocked by what had happened to them and and by the people that they had lost.

So when you're faced with that level of horror, it raises some really difficult questions.

Like, first among them, how could God let something like this happen?

And that's the question we're tackling today.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Otherwise known as the problem of evil.

So it's one thing when human beings are the ones causing the evil and the suffering.

That's bad enough.

But we can understand that God created us in the image of God.

And that means if we're like God, then we have a certain amount of freedom as human beings to change and to impact the world.

And many times we human beings use that freedom for good.

We co-create with God.

We love the creation and we love the people in it.

But oftentimes we end up doing unspeakably horrible things to each other and to the world.

And that's how evil and injustice come into the world and lead to things like slavery or Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, the Holocaust, violence against women, genocides, just to name a few things.

Now hear me clearly about this.

God is not neutral about any of those things.

God is furious about it, in fact.

I mean, the prophets, you read the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, and they're full of God's rage over exactly those kinds of things.

But at the same time, God doesn't override the freedom he gives us.

So God does something else.

God stands with the people that those things are done to.

More on that later.

So that's difficult enough.

But then what do we do in cases like the 2004 tsunami?

Or what about the massive earthquakes that happened in Venezuela this just this past summer?

Or what about when you get a message from your doctor that says you may have cancer or MS or an autoimmune disease?

Why do those things have to happen?

So this is where the problem in the problem of evil comes in, because in the Bible we read that God is both all-powerful and all-loving.

So if God is those things, doesn't it make sense that God could snap fingers and stop tsunamis or earthquakes or cancer diagnoses from happening, right?

And if God doesn't, then why doesn't God do that?

So some people have said maybe God is all-loving and God wants to help us, but God just isn't powerful enough to stop everything from happening.

I mean, some things slip through his fingers, so to speak, right?

Or other people have said, even worse, maybe God is all-powerful and God can do whatever he wants and stop all those things from happening, but God isn't all-loving and so doesn't always care enough to stop bad things from happening.

See what I mean?

This is a real problem.

Because neither one of those scenarios is very good news, and they don't seem to match the God that we meet in Jesus.

So, how do we navigate those things?

Well, I've got bad news and good news.

The bad news, and I have to be completely honest with you about this, is that the Bible just doesn't seem to be very interested in answering the question that we're asking, at least when we frame it up this way.

And while human beings have struggled with this question down through history, in the last 300 years or so, people have even taken the Bible's non-answer to this question as a reason to doubt the existence of God.

So that's the bad news.

The good news is that even though we don't have an answer to the logical or the philosophical problem of evil, the Bible is very interested in giving us the resources that we need to be resilient in the face of evil and suffering in the world.

And in the process, we get some clues as to what God may be up to in the midst of all of this.

So, what I hope we can see this morning is that even though all of our questions about why bad things happen to good people aren't answered, at least on this side of eternity, we can be crystal clear that God is committed to ending evil and suffering in the world through Jesus.

God is absolutely committed to ending evil and suffering for the world and for everyone in it.

So let's dig in.

Let's begin with the most important part of all of this, and that's that Jesus is God's response to evil and suffering in the world.

See, God loves the world.

If God didn't love the world, it wouldn't exist.

We wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be sitting here this morning.

And so, God, in the face of all of that evil and suffering and pain in the world, doesn't just sort of stay up in heaven, removed, safe and nice and comfortable, away from all of this pain and our mess.

Instead, God enters into it and experiences the worst of it through the person of Jesus.

So listen to how the Apostle Paul puts this in his letter to the church at Philippi.

This is Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8.

Philippians 2:5–8

He says, Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus.

What attitude was that?

Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit, but he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave.

And becoming like human beings, when he found himself in the form of a human, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Now, in coming near, Jesus didn't just enter into our world of suffering and pain and sorrow and death only to experience it, although he definitely did that, and that was powerful.

Jesus entered into our experiences so that he could undo them from the inside out.

So there's this really interesting image in the book of Revelation that that illustrates the healing work of Jesus.

Now, any time you're reading Revelation, you got to be careful because there's all of this imagery and crazy things going on in it that that can get really confusing or misleading if you don't know how it all works.

And so there's some some really out there stuff that people have said.

But but listen to this.

John, the author of Revelation, is describing this vision and these images that he's seeing.

And so he tells us in Revelation 22, verses 1 to 3, says this Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the great street of the city.

Revelation 22:1–3

This is a vision of sort of the world at the end when everything is made right.

And on each side of the river stood the tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.

And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

No longer will there be any curse.

So the tree of life in this passage is a symbol.

From the earliest days of the church, Jesus' followers interpreted this tree of life symbol in Revelation as a symbol for the cross, a symbol for the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection.

And so while we often tend to talk about in our circles, Jesus' death and its significance for us personally, like forgiveness of sins and a hope of spending eternity with God, and all of those things are completely true and legitimate.

This passage talks about the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection and how it doesn't end with how it affects you and I as individuals.

But through Jesus' death and resurrection, God has defeated evil and the corruption of the world and even death itself.

And eventually God is going to do away with those things completely.

And so Revelation paints a picture for us of a world where the cross brings about a creation full of life and healing and wholeness instead of suffering and death, a world where God will finally have done away with evil and suffering and injustice for good.

They won't exist anymore.

And so listen to how the prophet Isaiah puts that in one of my favorite passages of the whole Bible, Isaiah 25, verses 6 through 9.

Isaiah 25:6–9

Isaiah says, On this mountain, the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations.

He will swallow up death forever.

And the sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.

He will remove his people's disgrace from all the earth.

The Lord has spoken.

In that day they will say, Surely this is our God.

We trusted him and he saved us.

This is the Lord.

We trusted in him.

Let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.

So God will swallow up death.

And then God will wipe away the tears from all of our eyes.

So we don't ultimately know why God created a world in which we're so vulnerable to awful things happening to us.

But what we can have is incredible amounts of confidence that God is deeply committed to seeing our suffering and the suffering of the world ended for good.

So at this point, you might be thinking it's great, right?

God's going to end evil and suffering eventually.

But how is that good news for me right now?

How is that good news for victims of earthquakes and plagues and genocides?

Right?

Well, here's how the Bible deals with this.

It talks about how God's love is so powerful that it can take the pain and the suffering that we experience right now and bring good things out of it.

We call this redemption.

And that's that God can and will redeem all of the suffering that we experience.

Now, this isn't some theological sleight of hand, like God telling us, like, like, see, see, look, all these horrible things that are happening to you.

Well, they're they're not actually bad, they're actually good things.

No, that would be cruel.

Instead, this is saying something much more powerful.

This is saying that there is that God's love is so powerful that there is nothing so evil, that there is nothing so bad that God can't turn it around and use it to bring about good in our lives and in the world around us.

Amen.

So the Apostle Paul talks about this in his letter to the church at Rome, Romans 8 28, a verse that's probably very familiar to many of us.

Paul says, And we know that in all things, all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Now, we've talked about this verse here before.

Some people take this verse and end up waving it around as if to say that if you really trusted God, then you wouldn't be in pain when you're suffering, right?

And that's just spiritual bypassing, we call that.

And of course, being experiencing horrific evil or suffering hurts.

And knowing that God is going to redeem my suffering doesn't change the fact that it hurts.

But what it does do is in the midst of my suffering and pain, it gives me hope.

It gives me hope.

So Joseph Tetlow, a Jesuit spiritual director, shows us that what I think is a really healthy posture to have when we're walking through suffering.

And so, paraphrasing an ancient prayer called the Animachristi, which is just Latin for the spirit or the soul of Christ, he says this, this really powerful line.

He says, I choose the awful agony of Christ to charge my senseless sorrows with meaning, and to make my pain pregnant with power.

One of the worst things that we can experience in our suffering is to feel like it's meaningless.

And in fact, this is, as scientists and therapists, and psychologists have studied trauma, this is one of the things that trauma does.

It robs us of meaning because what happens to us just feels so senseless and meaningless.

But in Jesus, we have the hope that nothing we suffer is meaningless.

This doesn't somehow make evil or suffering or injustice good.

We always need to call those things what they are: evil, horrific things that never should have been a part of God's world.

But what it does mean is that evil and suffering and injustice, they can never have the last word.

God's love through Jesus will always take our suffering and use it for our healing and our wholeness.

But how does God do that?

So now we're we're in the realm of trauma.

And there's this really interesting insight from a medical doctor named Gaber Mate.

He says this trauma is not what happens to us.

It's not the events that happen as bad as they are.

Instead, it's what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

So if you ever wonder why some people experience just awful, horrific things in life, but then they heal and they move on as relatively well-adjusted, whole people.

While at the same time, other people experience things and they never seem to get past what happened to them.

Well, trauma researchers like Mate are coming to recognize that the difference is whether someone has an empathetic witness in their lives.

Trauma doesn't come from the event itself, it comes from feeling alone and unseen in the midst of that horrific experience.

So what people who have experienced suffering need, either in the midst of it or in the aftermath, is an empathetic witness.

We need to know that when suffering and evil happens to us, that we're seen, that what happens to us is seen.

And even more importantly, that the sadness, the grief, the loss, the anger, the lament that we all have and experience are seen and empathized with as well.

So other humans can offer that to us.

We'll talk about that more in a minute.

But the Bible is also chock full of places where God tells us that God longs to be that empathetic witness in our lives.

I mean, back to the prophet Isaiah.

This is what Isaiah says in Isaiah 43.

But now this is what the Lord says: He who created you, Jacob, he who formed you Israel, do not fear, for I have redeemed you.

I have summoned you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze, for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

So no matter what you go through, God is not only there, God sees you.

God empathizes with the fear, with the insecurity, with the uncertainty about the future, with the grief, with the anger that you have.

God sees it all and he never judges you for it.

God knows you and will walk through it with you.

And remember, like we already talked about, God doesn't just empathize with us while staying remote and distant from our pain.

No, God in Jesus enters into our suffering.

Listen to how the author of Hebrews puts it, Hebrews 2, 17 and 18.

For this reason, he, meaning Jesus, had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Now, this is important because God in Jesus has experienced the worst of what human experience has to offer us.

And in the midst of it, God doesn't judge our inner turmoil.

God never tells us, just get it together and trust me, will you?

Right?

God doesn't do that.

Instead, God is compassionately and tenderly present with us in exactly the ways that we need, even when we don't fully know ourselves what we need.

And so it's that presence with us, compassionately and empathetically, being with us in our pain that can help us heal from the traumatic events in our lives.

Now it's one thing to know this, right?

But another thing to actually have it help us as we're walking through the difficult things.

In our lives.

So, how do we not just know that this is all true, but how do we make it a part of our experience, a part of our everyday reality?

Well, first, God gave us a community, what we call the church.

And part of the reason that God calls us into community and not into a lone ranger life of faith is because when you're in a healthy community, some of the effects of evil and suffering get absorbed by the community.

So it doesn't all fall on your head by yourself.

See, we Americans, we're so individualistic.

And what I mean by that is that we just we have this focus on ourselves or our nuclear families to the exclusion of sort of a wider community or a wider circle of care.

But folks who come from a more communal society know that when hard times come, and they will, it's not a matter of if, but when, when those hard times come, the community is there to love and support you.

And so when evil and suffering happen to the whole community, rather than having to sit and process it by ourselves, going through an ordeal in community gives us the strength and the resources that we didn't know we had.

In our lifetimes, one of the most powerful examples of this is the history of the black church.

I mean, the reason that there is a black church is because of just the horrible history of enslavement and racism in the Western world.

And so these enslaved African peoples, oftentimes they weren't allowed to even participate in the life of the broader church.

And so what they ended up doing was they ended up having their own secret gatherings, oftentimes, where they would they would gather and dance and sing and chant and cry and lament and listen to God's promises to them.

And eventually that became institutionalized in these black denominations and these black churches.

And even after the end of slavery, when Jim Crow segregation was a part of the rule of law in the South, black churches became a place where people could go and have their full human dignity and humanity affirmed.

Maybe day to day they weren't out there experiencing the fullness of their humanity as they were degraded.

But they could go to church and in the presence of the community and in the presence of God realize that they were image-bearers of God, worthy of all the same rights and dignity as everyone else.

And so the church became the place that allowed the black community to endure the worst of what Western civilization had to offer and come through it with powerful wisdom and powerful testimony.

And in our own recent history here in Santa Cruz, I think about the CZU fires that happened six years ago and how the churches came together to be shelters for people that were displaced and to offer food and clothing and shelter to people that had lost everything through those fires.

Because when you're going through a horrific situation, doing it in community is a way that God offers us the resources to make it through and to come out the other side.

So, how do we do this as a church?

How do we experience this together?

Well, we need to practice it.

And so I want to offer us as we close this morning three practices that we can do both individually and as a community together, a Santa Cruz Bible church, that can help us be a place where we take refuge from the evil and the suffering happening in the world and absorb its effects together.

And those three practices are the practice of lament, the practice of forgiveness, and the practice of communion or Eucharist, depending on your background, what it's called.

So lament, forgiveness, and communion.

Let's talk about each of these three.

So lament is a practice where we cry out to God with our pain.

Sometimes Christian culture has made us feel like we can't, we can't question God.

We can't admit that we're really struggling to God, right?

Because then then I'd be admitting that I don't really have enough faith, or that's what people think, right?

We can't rage about our circumstances to God.

But one of the beautiful things about the Bible, places like the book of Job or the Psalms or many places in the prophets, is that you find people offering really messy laments to God, right?

And it's it's not always even tied up in a nice neat bow at the end of it.

And God is so compassionate and so understanding and so emotionally mature that God's not offended when we bring him our messy laments.

And so therapists and spiritual directors have both learned the value of naming it to tame it.

If you've heard this phrase before, that just means that no problem can be addressed until it's named.

And even the act of naming it by itself, naming what we're going through, the experience, the emotions, the messiness of a way, the messiness of it has a way of calming everything down in our bodies.

Doesn't fix it, to be sure, but it's the start of a process of healing.

And so when you're struggling, offer to God your laments.

Do you feel like you have no idea how to even do that?

What you'd even say to God, here's what I'd suggest: find the psalm that resonates with you and offer that to God as your lament.

There's nothing wrong with taking those words.

In fact, the whole reason they're in our Bible is so that they can become our words and teach us how to offer to God every, the whole spectrum of our range of emotions, including the messy and difficult ones.

But while it's important for us to do this as individuals privately, it's also powerful, really powerful for the church to lament together.

So when there's evil and horrific things happening in the world, the church, this place should be a place where we can come together and lament and grieve those realities together.

And there's hope that we can find that we're not alone in the midst of our suffering.

So that's the practice of lament.

The second practice, as I said, is forgiveness.

And forgiveness is a process through which we unburden ourselves of the wrongs that have been done to us in the past.

So one of my most important teachers of the past 10 years or so has been South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Went on a short-term missions trip about seven years ago to South Africa and read a bunch of Desmond Tutu in preparation from that trip and was massively impacted by what he did in South Africa in the resisting apartheid and then afterwards in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

And what he realized, and what South Africa realized, was that in the aftermath of just horrific abuses of racism and power in apartheid South Africa, what the country needed was a way to heal.

And that healing could only begin by naming what happened.

That's the lament piece, but then offering forgiveness, which isn't about just sort of waving a magic wand and saying, oh, those bad things that happen, they don't matter.

What it is, is naming those things so that we don't have to be burdened by them.

We don't have to drag the traumas of the past with us into our future.

And so they established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where anyone who had committed abuses during the era of apartheid in South Africa could come and if they made a full and complete confession of their crimes, so they they had to admit in front of God and the world and their families and everyone what they had done, if they admitted it, they could receive a full and complete pardon for their crimes.

And that was how South Africa moved forward past the horrors of apartheid in that era in South Africa.

Because he recognized that there was no future for that country without forgiveness.

And just as there's no future for us individually, if we hang on to the evils and the injustices that have been done against us in the past, there's no future for us as a nation, as a country, as a society, as a community, unless we also move past those things.

And so forgiveness isn't just waving a magic wand and saying, oh, those things don't matter.

It's saying we're not going to let them define us or burden us anymore.

In the light of what Jesus has done, we can be free of those things, even while still naming how awful they actually were.

So that's the practice of forgiveness.

And finally, communion.

Most of us are familiar with this, I'm sure, but communion, or some churches call it Eucharist, is a practice where followers of Jesus remember and not just remember, but also enter into an experience of Jesus' death.

Remember, we talked about this morning how Jesus' death is paradoxically not just the suffering and the death of Jesus on the cross, it's also the way that God is bringing healing to humanity and to the world at the same time.

It's a reminder that when the worst happens, when we struggle to make sense of the seemingly senseless things that happen around us, we can trust that that suffering is not the end of the story.

The suffering that so many millions of people endured after the 2004 tsunami, the suffering of so many marginalized communities in our world, the suffering that happens to all of us out of the blue will not define us.

They will not get to have the last word.

They will not be the end of the story because of what Jesus has done.

God's mercy, God's compassion, God's empathetic presence with us for all eternity are what each of us has to look forward to.

And when we come to the table, as we will in just a moment, we're receiving Jesus' body and blood symbolized in the bread and in the cup as a way of reminding us and giving us grace for our journeys to remember that no matter what you are going through, hope and healing and mercy and wholeness are your future.

So Jesus invites us to his table this morning.

Because gathered around a table is where he so often met people, because he could see people face to face, listen to their stories, share their laughter.

And so here, metaphorically this morning, we're gathered around Jesus' table because this is where Jesus is promised to be for those who want to meet him.

So I invite you this morning, accept his invitation, feel welcome at this table.

You don't have to do anything to earn it or be worthy of it.

Simply wanting to come and being hungry is what qualifies you to come to Jesus' table.

Because Jesus, who here offers us a foretaste of eternal life, invites us to be his guests.

So on the sides of the room, both sides, and in the back, there are three tables.

In a moment, as Kate and the worship team come and lead us in our final song.

When you're ready, you don't need to get up immediately, but when you're ready, you can go and receive the elements: a little piece of bread, a little cup of juice that we use to celebrate communion together.

And bring it back to your seats and hold it there because we're going to receive it together after the song.

I'll come back and lead us in that.

But as you're as you're sitting, you you may want to sing along with the song, or as an alternative, I invite you to reflect on all the difficult things that have happened in your life and the ways that God has been present to you, or the ways that you wish that you could experience God being present to you.

Because God can and will redeem every single thing that you have experienced because he loves you.

So let's pray as Kate and the worship team come.

Holy three and one, we thank you for Jesus, who was born among us incognito, who grew up without privilege or status, who walked the way to heaven through the back streets of the world, who told the deepest truths in ordinary language, who touched and healed, blessed and disturbed without fear or favor, who showed inclusive love in all its unconditional glory, and who for all this was crucified, died, and was buried, and who for all this and for all of us rose again, and who, though high in heaven, is present with us here and now.

So, God beyond holiness, as we do what Jesus once did, let your spirit move among us to settle on this bread and cup, that they may become for us our true spiritual food.

And let that same spirit stir our souls so that as we share the sacrament, we may recognize our Lord and receive him, that he may be in us and we in him forever.

Amen.