today we are talking about the problem of evil. As you know, undoubtedly last week, Wednesday night, late in the evening, two teenage boys took knives and hatchets and killed their three siblings tried to kill a fourth sibling as young as five years old and killed their parents. And when we see that kind of thing, we're horrified, we should be horrified. And we cry out, if you have a soul, you cry out, God, why did you let that happen? How could you let that happen? And that is the problem of evil that we are going to speak about this morning. The problem of evil can be stated clearly like this, if God is all good, he would not want evil to exist. If he is all powerful, he could prevent evil from existing. Evil exists, therefore either God is not all good and likes evil, or he is not all powerful and cannot prevent evil, or he doesn't exist. In other words, since evil exists, you only have three choices. Either God is evil and likes it, God is weak and not all powerful, or God doesn't exist. Now, before we begin talking about it, I want to acknowledge the weight of that argument. That is a stunningly powerful argument. It is an argument that has lasted for centuries for a reason. It is the argument that prevented Albert Einstein from being a believer in God. He, the greatest scientist in the world during his day, he would have expected to hear that it was evolution or something like that that would keep him from being a believer. Actually, his scientific research showed him such a fine-tuned universe. He believed there had to be a God. But evil, the rumors of what was coming out of Nazi Germany, the pains that he had suffered caused him to believe that there is no possible way a personal powerful God could exist if he wasn't going to prevent that. It is an emotional argument. It is an emotional argument that gets to our hearts. There is a nagging, crying out sense that things ought not to be this way. A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, rather, spent time as an army ranger and special forces, disembarked and bad things. Then he came back to America and the Lord called himself and called him into the ministry. He was trying to figure out where he wanted to do ministry, what kind of ministry he wanted to do. He went to this kind of missions conference and was walking through the display rooms and saw these displays for different kinds of missions. He saw, behind one table, there was this ministry that reached out and addressed social injustices and evils. He saw it, they had a picture on the table of this young black slave and chains. He had been beaten and he was looking straight out of the picture with eyes filled with despair and heartbreak. At that point, my friend said he felt all the weight of all the sin and the world crushed down upon him. In the middle of this room, this tough guy, absolute, strong man by every definition of the word began to ugly cry, just pour out tears. This sweet, wonderful African American lady came out from behind the table and she wrapped him up in her big arms. And she whispered into his ear, it's not supposed to be this way, isn't honey. And he started just wailing on her shoulder, this complete stranger just in her embrace wailing on her shoulder, it's not supposed to be this way. It's not supposed to be this way. And we feel that. Honestly, if you don't feel that, I don't want to be your friend. We feel that. And so what do we as Christians say to this problem of evil? It's a real question. And I want to address it two ways. Briefly, I want to talk about it rationally. I don't think it's primarily a rational argument. But I do want to show that the rational argument doesn't prove as much as some people think it does. And then we want to talk about it biblically. Rationally, I have two things I want to say. First of all, the argument against evil, the argument from evil, does not prove that God can't exist. It only proves that we don't see, we don't understand how good an all-powerful God exists. If we are going to argue the existence of an infinite mind, then we have to assume that infinite mind would understand things we don't understand. So greater minds can understand things that lesser minds can't. And they understand that there are reasons for them. When we have birthday cake on the table and my untrained dog is prone to jump up on the table and eat it, I have to lock her in the laundry room. And she thinks I am being evil. She thinks there's no possible reason why a good and loving master would lock her away from this chocolate cake. And that's because she has a lesser mind. She doesn't understand. When I take my children to get vaccinations, they don't understand how there could be any possible good reason why my father is holding down my arms and legs and face and letting this complete stranger come at me with a sharp needle and puncture me with a potentially deadly virus. They don't understand how that could possibly be good, but I understand that I don't like it. I don't want it to happen, but I also don't want my kids to get polio or the measles. And so I do it. There are things that lesser minds don't understand. All we've proven is that we don't understand it. And the fact that we don't understand it doesn't mean it can't be true. That's the first rational response. The second rational response is this. The argument against God's existence because of evil proves too much for the atheist. What I mean is this, we're crying out that there is injustice, injustice, that there is evil. And so therefore God can't exist. But the question is this, if God doesn't exist, where did this idea of justice come from? The idea of there is justice that justice exists means that there has to be a standard. I wouldn't know that a line were crooked unless I had seen a straight line. There has to be a standard of what is right and wrong. Where did that standard come from? Is it just my personal choices, my personal fancies? Well, that's not what my heart's trying out. My heart's not trying out. There are things that I don't like. My heart's trying out, this is wrong. Is it social that we created as communities? Is it created by democracy? Well, you know the majority of humans in the world believe that slavery was right. Were they right? You know the majority of Germans and Nazi Germany thought it was okay to extinguish and kill Jews. Were they right? Does the majority get to decide what's right? No. And we're not saying people are doing things that the majority doesn't like. We're saying they're doing something this wrong. Where does this desire, this belief and right and wrong come from? If there is nothing but nature, if there's nothing but evolution, then evil doesn't exist. There just is what is. It's not evil when a lion kills a zebra. It's not evil when a black widow kills her mate. And it's not evil when a boy kills his father. It just is what it is. If the father were strong enough, he would have killed his son. And it's just the way we get rid of weakness. And we know that's not true. The fact, I'm not trying to make this a conclusive argument, I don't think it is. But I do think the fact that you are so sure that evil exists, the fact that you're so bothered by it shows me that the Bible is correct, that God has given you a conscience. He's written his law in your heart and you know that there is right and wrong. Where would that come from if God did not exist? Well that doesn't answer the problem. It does not answer the problem. It's critiques. But that does not answer the problem. And I think we need to go much further than that. And I want us to look with the time we have left it with the Bible says. And the Bible tells us four very clear things about evil. The first thing the Bible tells us about evil is that God hates it. In Genesis 6 it's important that you see this. I think the one of the flaws in the problem of evil is this. We assume that since God is all powerful, everything that happens, he must be okay with. If I were all powerful, there's nothing that I would allow that I'm not okay with. Right? I mean I would have ice cream for dinner and ice cream would make you thin. And you know that's the way it would be if I were all powerful. And we assume that since God is all powerful, everything is exactly the way he wants it. That's not true. Look at what Genesis 6 says. I read it for us in our confession. It says the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart. God looked upon the violence. He looked upon the rape. I'll show you what the rest of Genesis 6 teaches if you want me to at some point. But he looked upon the evil that man was perpetrating against women and against other men and it grieved him to his heart. He was sorry that he made man. He hated it. He sees every evil act. He hates evil more than we do. He hates evil because he knows what is right. He is all loving. He has a perfect standard. His standard has not been jaded by video games and violent sports and things that were we kind of enjoy seeing violence. He hates every single act. And he sees everyone. He can't turn away. If you're like me, you just have been monitoring the amount of news you're willing to read. You'll read a little bit of the articles coming out of Broken Arrow and you say, no, that's enough. I can't stand anymore. And you turn away. God can't turn away. He sees every child that is getting abused every night. He sees every abortion up close and personal. He sees every rape. He sees every act of sexual immorality. He sees every one of them and they break his heart. And he can't turn away. And he's sorry that he made man. The first thing the Bible teaches us is that God hates evil. But the contradiction, the problem is the second thing is God loves us. He loves his people. He loves humans. And evil can't be separated from people. See, we want to think of evil as being out there. Why doesn't God get rid of evil out there? And what the Bible teaches us is that evil lives in here. Where does evil live? It lives in the heart of man. And the only way that God can destroy evil from the earth is by removing humans from the earth. That's what the story of Noah's Ark teaches us. There's this false idea that a lot of people read the Bible with and this idea that what God is doing is he's trying to find a way to save people. And so he keeps trying all these different ways. He's like, well, I'll try killing them all. And that didn't work. And so I'll try Abraham and Faith. And that didn't work. And so I'll try Moses and Law. And that didn't work. And I'll try David and Kings. And that didn't work. And God finally just throws up his hands and goes, well, I guess I'm going to have to save them. Okay, that's not what's happening. Okay, it's not a huge 2,000 years of trial and failure. What it is is God showing us why he had to come. And in Noah's Ark, what God is showing us is this. If he killed every human from the earth except the most righteous man, the only person he spared was the most righteous man on the planet. If he killed everybody else, but the most righteous man on the planet, evil would still thrive. Why did he send the flood? Because every thought of man's heart was only evil all the time. What did he declare? After the flood, look at Genesis chapter 9. It's in your bulletin. It says, when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man. For the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. It didn't work because evil is in our hearts. And it's not going anywhere. And we don't like that. You see how much we hate that in all the silly and dumb comments that have been made about this tragedy in Broken Era. If you have the stomach to read comments, which I don't typically, you just see all these dumb things after the news stories, right? Well, you know, that's what happens when you're homeschool. Come on, that's just please. Or that knew that family was weird. Yeah, every weird family is killing each other. That's what's happening. And we know that stuff's not true, but why do we do that? Because we want to keep evil in its corner. We want to say, oh, that's why he did it. He was homeschooled. Well, there was something weird going on in that house. There's weird things going on in a lot of houses. And the truth of the matter is that we are trying to define evil to protect ourselves from it and say, oh, that is never going to touch me. And the truth is the seeds are in your heart. In 1960, the Israeli commandos, the commandos of the Israeli army, the general daring arrest. They arrested a man who diluted them for 20 years almost. Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Eichmann was the mastermind of the Holocaust. He designed Auschwitz and he made killing mass people into a process that was an engineering wonder and was responsible for the death of millions. And they called him and they put him on trial. It was the first trial to everybody nationally, a worldwide broadcast. And literally people from every nation in the world were watching this trial. And one of the eyewitnesses they brought in, one of the first ones was a man named Yehild De Nure. He had been a child at Auschwitz. It's seen Eichmann face to face. And they were bringing in eyewitnesses to explain what he had done. And so the courtroom was absolutely silent and they brought in De Nure and they put him in the witness stand and he looked into this bulletproof case where Eichmann sat and there he was with his horn room glasses and a suit. And De Nure started shaking and crying and then just burst out and loud sobs and cries and he couldn't testify and they had to they had to dismiss court for the rest of the day. And years later he gave an interview on 60 minutes and they asked him why what was it that made you burst into tears? Were you looking at a monster? Were you remembering all the evil things that he had done? What was it that made you cry? And De Nure looked and he said no it was none of that. I saw that he was a man. For these years I had made him out to be a monster and when I looked at him I saw that he was just a man. And if he could do that kind of evil then I could do that kind of evil. And I think it was Mike Wallace who summed up the interview by staring straight into the camera and saying so what was Eichmann and was he a monster? Was he the product of an evil philosophy or was he normal? And most terrifying answer of them all is when the Bible says he was normal. Not all of us go to that great length and evil. God restrains us through different ways. But evil works in our hearts. That's where it rests. And the only way that God can remove evil from this earth would be to remove us from this earth. And so we would never be here to ask the question.
And so the first thing the Bible teaches us about evil is that God hates it. And the second thing he teaches us about it is that evil lives in the human heart and cannot be separated from us. And he loves us. That's why he tolerates it. But there's more. The third thing he teaches us is that God punishes evil in his son. God was stands evil. He himself undergoes evil to save his people. Second Corinthians 5, which we read for our call to worship, it's a fascinating text. And I want you just to acknowledge that. It says four hours say he made him to be sin who knew no sin that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He does not say he made him to be the punishment for sinners. It does not say he made him to stand the punishment for those who deserved it in their place. It said he made him to be sin. That's awkward. And I don't know all that that means. But theologians and those smarter than me are trying to get to the truth. And what they say is this. They say. Well, first let's go like this. Have you ever wondered why Jesus didn't die more bravely? Has it ever bothered you how he shook and he cried and he the night before his death he begged God not to do it? Isn't that bothered you? I mean, he's a hero. Why can't he die like Braveheart? Freedom! Why does he have to be afraid of it? Why can't he die like the martyrs? And what theologians believe is this that Jesus knew he was going to have to die. He told his disciples that many times. I'm going to Jerusalem to die. I'm going to be betrayed. I'm going to die. And the third day I'm going to rise from the dead. I knew that. Luke says he set his jaw like Flint to go to Jerusalem. He knew he was going to die there. But what we believe is that he did not know that he was going to become sin. And the righteous perfect man on the night before his death saw in his human nature. He saw that he was going to become rape. He was going to become murder. He was going to become torture. He was going to become all kinds of perversion. He was going to become sin. And when God poured his wrath out on his son, he was punishing sin. He was punishing evil. That's part of what God has done. The other thing is he has shown us how he is just. He's played the man. He is undergone everything that he demands of us. I mean, think of it like this. When you hear about a five-year-old getting killed with a hatchet by his brother, don't you get angry? Don't you want to look at God and say, why didn't you stop that? Don't you want to put God on trial and say, how dare you not prevent that? Don't you want to spit on him? Don't you want to yell at him? Don't you want to hit him with whips? Don't you want to nail him to a cross? And in Christ, God Himself has let us do that. He has taken the blame. He has taken the weight of sin. And has been punished for it. That's not where it ends. In taking on evil, He swallowed it and He defeated it. And the important thing to understand is He promises to eradicate evil completely. Because He has undergone evil and defeated it at the resurrection, He promises to eradicate it completely. Listen to this promise. He said, we're told in the last chapters of the Bible. He says, I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people. And God Himself will be with them as they are God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. They're gone. God is telling us, if you read Revelation 20 and 21 and 22, He tells us that everything evil will be thrown into the lake of fire and they will cease to exist. We are going toward a day when we will wake up in the new heavens and the new earth and we will be at home for the first time. And everything evil, everything dark will no longer exist. It will be like waking up from a nightmare and realizing the nightmare is not true. Realizing that all those things you feared, they're not real because they won't be real anymore. They won't exist anymore. I have a recurrent nightmare. I actually had it last night. I have it on a lot of Saturday nights. It's this kind of test anxiety nightmare where I dreamed that I failed out of college. I dreamed it was my senior year and I had forgotten to go to a class all semester. I had forgotten that I signed up for it. I had gone to graduation but instead of getting a diploma, I found out that I had failed. And I was not going to get a diploma. And this dream caused me so much anxiety when I first graduated. I had so much anxiety. I would get up in the middle of the night and go find my diploma. I'd pull it down off the wall and I would just stare at it two in the morning. I did it. I graduated. It was weird. It was like holding it made me feel as good as graduation. I got to graduate over and over. My fears aren't real. And God's telling us that there's going to be a day when not only will we wake up and see that everything bad has come untrue. But we won't ever have the nightmare again. It's gone. It's been cast into the lake of fire. It was Satan himself. It has been destroyed. I used to think of evil from our perspective like I'm sure you all heard his illustration that God is weaving a tapestry. And we're looking at the back of the tapestry. And so it looks like chaos and mess. But one day when we're resurrected, we'll get to see the top of the tapestry. We'll get to see what he's done and everything will be beautiful and makes sense. And I actually think there's some application there for suffering but not for evil. Evil will not be part of the tapestry. God hates it. He's going to throw it into the lake of fire. Nothing good will come out of it. It won't exist anymore. It will be gone forever. He will destroy it. When my friend was walking through that convention center and that lady was holding him and he was crying on her shoulder, it's not supposed to be this way. It's not supposed to be this way. She started patting him. And with that sing-song African-American voice, she started saying, Jesus is going to make everything all right. He's going to make it all right. The answer to the problem of evil is not easy. It is not airtight. It is an answer of faith that Jesus is going to make it all right. It's not an argument for some abstract God. I don't think any other God exists. I think it's a very big problem for any God who did not himself take on evil. It did not himself suffer under evil. I think that's why none of those gods exist and why you shouldn't believe in any of those gods. But our God, the God of Christianity, Jesus, he suffered and we can believe him and we can trust him that he's going to make everything all right. And that's the faith I'm inviting you to today. And I hope you'll at least open your heart to the possibility that it's true. Please pray with me. Father in heaven, evil causes us to shudder. It's awful. It causes us to want to cry out to you and wonder why you didn't prevent it. And yet, Father, even in the midst of all the darkness that you didn't prevent, we find that you're the only place we have to run. You're the only place we have to run. So we do run to you. And Father, I pray that you give us the faith to believe that you're going to make everything okay. Father, for those who are here today, who don't really believe in you, they're just not sure that that's a valid thing to believe. I pray that you give them some rays of hope. I pray that they would open the door to the possibility and they would see that on the other side of that door there is hope and there is life. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.