Northside Church - Sydney
Roadblocks Week 5: SUFFERING – Why do bad things happen to good people?
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. It was just another normal afternoon down in Cogra in 2007. Until that moment when this flash of red came across this particular girl's peripheral vision as she remembered, well, at least according to the City Morning Herald. And within the instant she said she couldn't remember much, but her and her friend Emma were walking past her bank and then suddenly a car had mounted the curb and gone straight across the top of Emma and crushed her to death. In an instant, an old plater had accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake, under the curb, plowed through ten people, all who had survived except for this 20-year-old girl, Christian girl, youth group leader, gorgeous fashion student, and wife was gone no longer a chance to unlove, no longer a chance to get married, no longer a chance to have kids gone. How is that fair? How is that fair? And how can a good God allow that sort of thing to happen in this world, right? Is that the question we ask ourselves? We're like, why not put somewhere that deserved to be hit by a car in that way, but not someone like this girl? And that is one of the great roadblocks to the faith that we're going to explore tonight. You see, we've come to the end of a series and there's no better way to finish it than on Easter Sunday. A series called Roadblocks. What are some of the great roadblocks to faith in Christianity through Jesus Christ? We've looked at things like doubts. What if I have doubts? We've looked at exclusivity. How can Jesus be the only way to God? Look at hell. If God's so loving, why does God send people to hell? We've looked at truth. Isn't there lots of different truths? How can Christians claim to have the ultimate truth? And yet here's the funny thing. I don't know if you would agree with me tonight, but I reckon it's this one. I reckon this one is the clincher. It's this objection. It is a clincher. It's this objection that for most people, the rest fade into the background and I think the reason for it is this. The objection is this, if the God of the Bible is so good and so powerful, then why does He allow bad things to happen to good people? And that's why I think this is a great roadblock to faith in Jesus Christ because all the other objections that we've looked at for the past five weeks, they're intellectual, but this is personal. It's personal for me because I knew Emma as a young kid. I'd piggyback to her at a family camping trip, I'd watch to grow up from a distance. I knew her parents. And I'm reading an article about her and when it comes to suffering, most of us in this place have experienced it in one degree or the other. In fact, some of you might be experiencing suffering tonight. Some of you might be going through it and look, I've got to say to you, this is probably not the message for you. If there's one thing tonight, just know that we want to support you, love you and hug you and care for you, there's no point getting caught up in the intellectuals tonight when we come to this topic, but suffering can seem so unfair, right? And quite frankly, it is when it comes to suffering, we're going to look at three things tonight. We're going to look at the problem of suffering and then we're going to look at the picture of suffering. We're going to look at the picture of suffering and then the plan for suffering that God has mapped out in his word. If you want to turn to his word, whether we're looking at Matthew chapter 16 verses, I'll go from 21 through to 28, Jesus predicts his death. From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised alive and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. "Never Lord," he said, "this shall never happen to you." And Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan, you're a stumbling block to me. You do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men." And then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me for whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for a person if they gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can a person give an exchange for their soul? But the Son of Man is going to come in his father's glory with angels and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. You see, first and foremost tonight, guys, we see the problem of suffering. I mean, if you live long enough, if you live long enough, then you probably could witness a child die. If you live long enough, you could see a disease engulf a loved one. If you live long enough, you could experience deep grief. If you live long enough, you can see relationship blow itself apart. If you live long enough, you could endure a war. If you live long enough, you're probably going to lose your job once or twice. What I'm saying here is part of the problem with suffering this world is that it's inevitable. It's going to happen and Jesus got that. I love the way he sends his boys out in John's gospel. He's sending them out into the world and he says, "In this world, you will have trouble." Jesus got that suffering is an inevitable part of this world. Here's the thing, suffering is not just a Christian problem, right? Suffering is the issue of every world philosophy. It's the problem of every person, whether you're a believer or not, not a believer tonight. It still exists. Here's the objection, right? I can't believe in the God of Christianity because if the God of the Bible is so powerful, then the presence of suffering in this world means that a God can't possibly exist, right? Now can you see the logic of that objection? I don't believe in a God. I don't believe in a God because there's suffering. I don't understand the reasons for suffering and therefore I don't believe in God. But here's a question I want to ask you tonight. Is it possible, is it possible that this God of the universe could have a reason for suffering that we don't understand? I mean, let me put it this way. When I was a kid, two or three, I was a toddler, I thought it'd be a really smart idea to roll down the driveway. We had a really steep driveway. I mean, this thing was huge and I just thought I'd start rolling. As I rolled and rolled and rolled, I went down the driveway and I slammed my head into a rock down at the bottom of the footpath, split my head right open. And luckily for me as a toddler, I don't remember too much of it, but as my dad explained, he took me down to the doctor and we waited there. We got into the doctor's room and that sort of stuff and the doctor said, "All right, well, let's just put the stitches straight on." Dad's thinking, "Well, what are you doing?" Give him an anesthetic or something like that. The doctor said, "Well, the anesthetic's going to hurt him as much as the stitch." And so there was my father having a hold, my little head down on the table and hold it still while the doctor pierced this needle through the top of my eye and as it stared into his eyes there. I can only imagine what he would have been feeling as he's precious and his beloved son was screaming with him with his eyes saying, "Dad, what are you doing?" Now my dad had a reason for my suffering that day that I couldn't possibly understand as a three-year-old, right? I can understand it now. Just give me the stitch. But I couldn't understand it then. And what I want to say to you tonight, guys, is that if my dad had a reason for my suffering as a three-year-old, then is it possible that the God of the universe, your heavenly father, has a reason for suffering that we can't possibly come to understand this side of heaven. And so, guys, because we don't know what the reason for suffering is, it shouldn't exclude the existence of this God, this loving God, simply because there are reasons beyond our comprehension, right? It has a one-pointer or another, it either will happen or it has happened. We're all going to be like a three-year-old who's copped a nick to the head and is having to go through a suffering in which they're just simply asking why. So, where does it leave us, guys, if suffering's inevitable, if we don't totally know why, and that's what I mean tonight, why is there evil in suffering in the world? I simply don't know. But where does it leave us? If suffering's inevitable, if we don't know why, you can take three different paths, you can go and try and avoid it, or you can embrace it, or you can ignore it. But I think the gospel of Jesus Christ offers us a different way tonight. What I want to say tonight is that you need a new ruler in your life. Perhaps if you're going, yeah, yeah, except Jesus is king and all that sort of stuff. No, it's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, you know, the rulers, like physical rulers, stationary rulers, I used to have them as a kid back in the '80s, where they had these funny grooves in them and they would have a picture underneath the plastic. And if you tilted the ruler in the light, it would show you two different pictures you guys ever seen those before? We've all had them once or twice, might still have one at home or at the office. I love those rulers, because you could see these two different pictures and the pen of which perspective you looked at it, it gave you a different picture and for me it was great because I had some times tables on it on one side and if you flipped it the other way, it gave you the answer. So six times three is 18. Thanks to my ruler. Look, what I'm saying is you need a new ruler in your life. That is that Christianity, Christianity in this way, doesn't offer a definitive answer to suffering, but it gives you the resources to deal with the questions. And like my school ruler, Christianity offers two pictures at Easter time that speak directly into this problem of suffering. Two pictures that are going to be on that ruler tonight, if you'd have a look at the picture of the cross, the picture of the tomb. The first picture we see is the picture of suffering at the cross. Verse 21, Jesus says, he goes to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the teachers and the law, that he must, he's saying here, the picture of Easter is that there's going to be death and suffering, not the sort of thing that Maya wants on their walls at Easter time or David Jones, but that is the picture of Easter. He paints it clearly in which to any normal person seems ridiculous, right? Why would you go and follow a God that talks about death and suffering? Surely there's got to be some better feature benefits to this religion here, Jesus. And it just didn't make sense. That's why it didn't make sense to Peter, he's one of his beloved disciples and what I love about it is that Peter says, no, no, that won't happen to you. In fact, it says, Peter rebuked Jesus. I love the image of an all-powerful, amazing, mighty, all-knowing God getting rebuked by one of his followers and slapping him around the head a bit. Jesus, that's not going to happen to you and look, why was Peter like that? I think it's because his line of thinking was how most of us can think at times, right, about God and suffering and all that sort of thing. It's like the little kid in the UK comedy called Outnumbered that you can see on the BBC. This little kid got stuck on the table at a wedding. Maybe this has happened to you and if you're next to me, I'm sorry, but he got stuck next to the minister at the wedding and this little eight-year-old kid starts asking him all these sorts of questions and he says, "Vicker, like if God is so powerful, then why would in Jesus at the cross just shapeshift and go down and smack all the Romans around the head and punch him in the face and kill him?" Of course, if God is so powerful, why wouldn't he just shapeshift at the cross? I'm thinking of course. You see, what Peter's thinking the same sort of way, look, if God is with you, Jesus, then surely suffering is not on your agenda. You're thinking how we think, if life's good, then God's with you, but if life's bad, then God can't be with you, right? And I have to ask you tonight, is that the sort of question you've asked yourself once or twice? If you ask that question when you go to one or three, one of those seasons in life where it's one thing after another and after another and another and you will think that you're at the lowest point in your life and things get worse and you will think, you look at suffering in your life and you say, "This can't be right either there is no God or either God is mad at me but he can't be with me and he can't be in the midst of my suffering and he can't get my suffering and yet, and yet Christianity is the only religion in the world with a picture of the cross in which you first meet God in the middle of suffering." As a pastor, I have people asking me all the time, "Sam, how can God get my grief? Sam, how can God get my loneliness? How can God get my rejection? How can God get my pain and my suffering?" And you see, the picture of Easter is a cross, it's not the sweet Easter eggs, it's a picture of a God who is experiencing for himself suffering, a God who is experiencing pain and suffering, a God who is experiencing loneliness and rejection, a God who has experienced the grief at losing a child. You know, and that gives me comfort because at Easter time what it shows me is we're not looking at a God who's chosen to detach himself from the world or a God who's chosen to give himself diplomatic immunity, you know, like a God who's chosen to extract himself from the equation, what we see here is a God who is chosen to go through it all himself. I call it the gospel according to UE insurance. I don't know if you've seen UE insurance, if you're not a Sydney cider, they're getting really big over here and their tagline right is that UE gets you and they say, "Sydney, we get you," which I find really fascinating because half of the stock shots on their ads are from cityscapes of Melbourne. So I'm thinking, I'm not sold, I'm still sticking with AAMI, but they catch cry, right? It's a gospel according to UE. The picture of a suffering God shows us tonight that he gets you. He gets your suffering, he gets your pain, he gets your loneliness, he experienced it at all. And if your objection to the faith is that, well, why does God allow bad things that happen to good people, this God experienced it himself. He went through it himself already and he understands it firsthand. If we just had that picture of suffering, though, it wouldn't bring us all that much comfort, would it? God still gets you, but we need something more than that. We need something more from it, we need to know the plan for suffering. What's the deal with suffering? The character from the great movie, The Never Ending Story, A Trae You, I don't think I've ever told you guys about this movie, but bear with me anyway, A Trae You was sent off as a child warrior to go through and discover an earthling child in order to save the lands of Fantasia. After his entire long mission, he eventually climbs his way back up to the ivory tower in front of the ruler of Fantasia, the childlike princess. And in desperation, he drops at her feet and he says, Empress, I've failed you. I couldn't find him. And she said, it's okay, A Trae You, you said, but I couldn't. My horse died. I got scratched up. I got lost in the swamp. So I just outrun the nothing, which is this evil force that was chasing him at the time. And all for what? Where is this kid? I did it all for nothing. And I can relate to a Trae You's pain and his desperation because here's the thing with suffering is when we want to answer the question, how do you endure pain and suffering now? Here's the thing. We need to know like a Trae You that our suffering wasn't in vain, that we didn't do all this for nothing. We didn't just go through all this junker life for nothing, that it wasn't in vain. It's like two people, you know, imagine two people that are told, you're going to sit in dark room with no windows and you're going to make widgets your entire life. In fact, no, we'll cut it down. We'll say for the next five years, and one person you say, we're going to pay you a dollar. And the other person you say, I'm going to pay you a million. Who do you think is going to whistle while they work? You see, we need something that allows us to move beyond our circumstances. One person is whistling away. The other one, it's like a living hell. And so we need something to move us beyond our present circumstances. How we live and act today is a function of our believed in futures. What we think the future is going to be like. And so in that sense, it's all got to do with hope. And so what's the Christian solution to suffering? Is it just heaven? Is it just a place that we fly off to in the clouds when we die? It's more than that because if it's just heaven, then that's just compensation for what we've already lost. We go up there in the clouds and we're reunited with family and friends. And if heaven's our hope, then that's just a compensation payment. But you see compensation payments don't fully work, do they? You talk to someone who's been injured really badly and you say to them, hey, here's a million bucks. Is there life back? No, there's something different about them, something that's changed. There's been a degradation of their life that no amount of money, whether it's 1 million or 10 million, can fix, right? Compensation's not enough. What about the person who's lost their son or daughter? How do you compensate that? You can't really. And so here's the thing. In the wake of suffering, it's not compensation that you're after, it's restoration. Restoration, that's why Easter shows us something entirely different. Look, what happened with Jesus in the tomb? Did he float away into some spiritual place? I mean, did he get reincarnated into a different type of person? In the tomb, did he sort of move to a higher level of self-actualization? None of that, it says, he said that the Son of Man had to be raised to life. He was bodily resurrected. People witnessed this. People saw this. People touched the holes in his hands and therefore Christian hope. What Easter says to us is not something about compensation, it's a hope of restoration. A restoration, the life that we've always wanted and we won't just be compensated, but like Jesus Christ in the glimpse that he gives us at the tomb, that everything will be made new. How else do I put it? This is the channel I've gotten in this place. Now, with that many sort of South Australians, Western Australians, I have to start using AFL analogies, okay? And I can watch the AFL Grand Finals about the only game that I ever really watch, but the thing that fascinates me about the AFL is just how far these guys run and how hard they do hit each other, they cop elbows in the face and they are dirty players compared to the rugby boys. And you see these guys, they are bruised and they're battered and they are absolutely dead on their feet, but when that horn goes at the final fourth quarter, that mysterious horn, I still don't understand why they can't work to a clock but they just leave this mysterious. And that final horn goes, some guys who are dead on their feet and bruised and battered and blood streaming off their faces leap for joy. They're of course the ones that won, but here's the thing, this pain that they've been feeling the entire game, the suffering, the victory dissolved the pain into joy. In fact, isn't it true that the greater the pain, the greater the suffering that they experienced, the greater the joy, the sweeter the victory? Guys, what I want to say to you tonight is that God's plan for suffering glimpsed at in the resurrection of Jesus is to dissolve every bit of hardship and suffering that you have experienced in your life and dissolve it into joy like those funny little sherbet things that you put on your tongue. That's what's going to happen to pain and suffering when you're reunited with Him. That's His plan, Revelation 21, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for a husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now, the dwelling of God is with men and He will live with them. They will be His people and God Himself will be with them and be their God." And here it is, He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away like sherbet. That's not in the Bible. Guys, there will be a day. We Christians live with that assurance that there will be no more death and no more tears and no more pain and no more mourning and no more crying. Guys, anyone that calls themselves a Christian knows that like an AFL player in the fourth quarter, they know that just this life now and this suffering experience is because the full-time siren hasn't sounded yet, AFL seems to get it right. We don't know ever know when it is going to sound but it will. It will soon and there will be victory and there can be victory through faith in Jesus Christ. And in that way, guys, Christianity is not a religion of cliches. It's not a bunch of little sayings that we push together just to make suffering feel better. The Christian future, the Christian hope is not a compensation for suffering but a restoration of all things that were taken away from you in this life. If you want that, the assurance things will be made new. The assurance that I will see, Emma, again, the assurance that the pain you're feeling right now will be no longer. The assurance that the grief you're feeling will be dissolved away. How do you get it? How do you get that hope? Do you have that sort of hope that moves beyond your circumstances? Are you just producing widgets in this life, guys? What is Easter really saying? It's saying, "Since Jesus was raised from the dead," look, let's not mistake Christianity here. Christianity is not about what did Jesus say or teach. Christianity is what has Jesus done and the guy was raised from the dead and it changed history. It changed history and what he did, he came in and it says that the very many of history is that redemption comes out of injustice and out of pain and out of suffering and out of devastation comes restoration and out of life comes out of death. It's the pattern. It's God's pattern. You know, I said he's the Mr. Squiggle principle, upside down, right? It's a God of the upside down and if we're wondering why life is not making sense and maybe you're looking at an upside down, there's an order to the suffering. If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me for whoever wants to save their life will lose it but whoever loses their life for me will find it. You know, that's not an order to do but that's a call to follow. Jesus Christ or you did that. How do we get it? How do you become a Christian? What Easter says to us, "If Jesus can uncomplainingly submit to his infinite suffering for us, then maybe we can take our finite suffering and submit uncomplainingly to him." That's how you get this hope. That's how you get it by being melted by the sign of Jesus Christ going through death in the resurrection for us and we know for sure that when we go into a personal death to our own life, then we too one day will go into a resurrection for him. So guys, suffering, the problem with it is it's inevitable and because we can find no reason for it is that it really grounds to dismiss this God who broke into the world in the form of Jesus Christ at Easter time, the question you need to be asking yourself tonight is, "Do I have a resource that will sustain me regardless of my circumstance?" And what I said to you tonight is, "You need a new ruler. You need to see the picture of the cross. You need to see a God who's the CEO of UE Assurance, the God who gets you. You need to see the tomb that says that this life is not all there is and God is making all things new and that could include you. But of course you need the ultimate ruler. I had to throw the Jesus thing in somewhere, didn't I? It only happens when we place our trust in a ruler who gets you. Edward Shalito says it like this, and I'll finish with this, "The heavens frighten us. They are to come. In all the universe we have no place. Our wounds are hurting us. There is the balm, Lord Jesus, by thy scars we know thy grace. The other gods were strong, but thou was weak. They rode, but thou did stumble to a throne. But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, and not a God has wounds, but thou alone." [BLANK_AUDIO]