Why Suffering
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Introduction
Introduction
Let me start with this - I don’t know an answer that truly satisfies
There isn’t one
there is mystery in the bible to all the why
But i can give us some help today in living while we don’t know all of the why
We live in what is called a disenchanted age
We say all that exists is what we can see and touch
We beleive we are the ones in charge and control
But we deep down don’t believe it
We see it in our stories
From Snow White to Sleeping Beauty to Lord of the Rings or Sar Wars and 1917our stories tell us something about what we really think and long for
Things are broken by darkness we cant put our finger on
A curse in on the land a dark power seems unstoppably advancing widowhood and broken relationships seem unbeatable
See deep down we long for a hero to break the curse we know is around us
Suffering makes us aware there is more then what we see and makes us long for more then the humanist answers can give us
Why does this dark curse exist no matter how much we try and avoid it?
What hope do we have?
And is there a hero big enough to conquer it ?
We get to look at some of this today as we look to answer the question of suffering
It is a question I have asked this week and struggle with and haven’t found a deeply satisfying answer too
You won’t find one for the why this side of heaven
But no matter how disenchanted or athiestic you may be here today the quesiton of why suffering is one we all have to answer not just christians
Why are things the way they are? What hope is there? How can things be made right?
Even if you reject God you still have to try and answer it
So if removing God from the question doesn’t remove suffering what do we do?
The Christian Message is unique from all other religions and worldviews in its response and it is the only hope we truly long for to break the curse to kill the dark evil and make happily ever after better then we could imagine
So here we go
We are going through 3 things today to give us the unique christian answer to how to cope with it and what we need in it
The Bible is Not Naive, Anchored in the Now, Anchored in the Cross
The Bible is Not Naive
The Bible is Not Naive
As I said this is a question all worldviews have to answer
And we have a unique message when it comes to the suffering we will all live through and have
Removing God doesn’t remove the suffering so that can’t be the answer
And throwing out what the bible has to say about it isn’t an option because the bible is not naive to the reality of the suffering in this life
The bible is the story of new creation because the Old is horrific
It is the story of the horrific never being big enough to stop God
It doesn’t shy away from what we live
There are mans choices to commit genocide, there is rape and prostitution crucufuxion, disease and starvation, canabalism, and the death of women of children, betrayal, injustice, and tears that could fill an ocean
The bible is not naive to the evil the world faces
Immanuel God with us means with us not just at christmas when we hear that name
It means God with us in doing something about the human condition that is full of those things because of what sin has done
It is Jesus weaping at a tomb at what sin has stolen but not a coward or weak God who does nothing about it
He hates it and enters into our world no matter what we did to make it that way to kill what makes us weap
Look with me at John 11
Death and confusion anger at what seems as God’s absence saturate the scene
Lazarus has been on the verge of death His sisters begged Jesus to stop it
And Jesus comes after He dies when he could have been there earlier and stopped it
A community is weeping in grief and confusion
Our God enters in to the reality of horrific grief and look at our God’s response
When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked.
“Lord,” they told him, “come and see.”
Look at the language deeply moved in sprit and troubled and get a picture of God in the midst of suffering
Those words don’t mean he was bummed or simply sad
The words mean the anger of a bridled horse biting down in rage
Your God has a rage toward what sin has made
The one who is angry at it came to kill it with His death
He says why he was late to the tomb and suffering came
John 11: 4 This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it
He will take suffering at its worst to show just how great his saving is when we see it happen
RIght when we are in the now of it
Anchored in the Now
Anchored in the Now
Not only is the bible not naive about the problem of suffering it gives us language to process it
There are types of psalms called laments
Lament psalms are a prayer expressing sorrow, pain, or confusion
Christopher Wright says this about Laments “Lament is not only allowed in the bible it is modeled in abundance. God seems to want to give us as many words as possible with which to fill out our complaint forms as to write our thank-you notes”
Maybe you grew up in a church and thought you always had to look on the brightside
thats not what the bible teaches
Lament is the wailing of the heart before a God who hears, who listens, and who responds to our cries.
There are around 65 Psalms (that is nearly half of the Psalms) that are from sufferers
We can learn alot from them
When we can’t even speak in the pain of this life God gives us words to cry to him
Wailing in suffering to God is our anchor in the now
What the laments do is give us a lens to interpret the pain through
Because we all have one
Paul Tripp says this so well
Human beings do not live life based on the facts of their experience but based on their interpretation of the facts. Let me say that again. Human beings do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts.
We dont just experience suffering
We experience suffering the way we interpret it
The Psalms are the lens God wants us to process suffering through so we are anchored when we don’t have answers
Psalm 42 is one of those
We see Homesick- Exile
There is so much pain form this author’s heart.
He has lost home, community, purpose, presence of God, the show of God’s power to save
My tears have been my food day and night,
while all day long people say to me,
“Where is your God?”
When suffering comes doubt rushes in
Maybe i have done too much wrong
Maybe grace isn't enough
maybe he can cover some sins but not my worst and this is my piunishment for it
The question then for God’s people is how are we going to interpret the experiences we know of a fallen world?
That is what Paul Trip was saying
We will live through suffering the way we interpret it
There is a saying that suffering produces character
I would disagree, suffering reveals what we are anchored in more then anything
This Psalmist is telling us in the now of suffering it is right to say it is God in control of it
He says to God it is YOUR waves that are crushing me, YOUR Name and Love and Presence that are gone it feels like
If not we are crushed and can’t cling to what we are going to see at the end
But he is anchored in the now
I will say to God, my rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about in sorrow
because of the enemy’s oppression?”
In all of our relationships with Christ and his people we will have pain create crisis’ of faith
1. This Pslam instructs us to be authentic
2. This Psalm instructs us to remember
nostalgia can be unhealthy but he remembers the right things
He doesn’t say life and flourishing are out there and I got it wrong he longs to be connected again to the God and people he remembers and know alone bring life
He remembers The Covenant God-
While the Sovereignty of God is a source of perplexing to the psalmist and can be to us it is also a source of comfort.
He does this in Psalm 42:8
The Lord will send his faithful love by day;
his song will be with me in the night—
a prayer to the God of my life.
There is an unshakable anchor in a right view of God
And that gives an anchor in the now of suffering
But it has to be cultivated everyday
Tim Keller says “The image of our glorious God delighting over us with all His being (Isa 62:4, Zeph 3:14, Dt: 23:5, 30:9) if this is only a mere concept to us then our needs, suffering, will overwhelm us and drive our behavior. Without the power of the Spirit, our hearts don’t really believe in Gods delight or grace, so they operate in their default mode. But the truths of the gospel, brought home by the Spirit, slowly but surely help us grasp in a new way how safe and secure how loved and accepted we are in Christ”
If your christianity is just good life hack advice or a ted talk you will have a faith with a low pain tolerance
If your saving is just a blind faith the concrete of suffering will overpower it
We have to be working to have a faith that answers all of lifes questions
We have to have a faith that makes sense of all of reality
Becuase we are always making meaning of our life
This Psalm teaches us we are always telling ourselves something
In suffering everyone is a theologian
The quesiton is are you a good one full of truth
We are always preaching some way to saving and coping to ourselves
Paul Tripp says: When that happens to you, when the unexpected, the unwanted, the unplanned, the hard and the difficult enters your life, you will always preach some kind of gospel to yourself, always. Everybody in this room is an archaeologist who will dig through the mound of his or her existence in order to make sense out of life. And so I want to think with you about the gospel, the gospel right here, right now and suffering.
We have this kind of understanding of christianity that it deals with my past and gives me some heaven future but miss the right now
Psalm 27:1 though can’t be missed
The Lord is my light and my salvation—
whom should I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—
whom should I dread?
Does he say the lord is A light a salvation, just a stronhold
No he says in the now of suffering i am going to interpret it through the lens of God as MY lens
We build that lens now so when suffering comes we have an anchor
And the author of Psalm 42 and Psalm 27 anchors his now in the Cross and what it promises
Anchored In The Cross
Anchored In The Cross
We have hope in trial because of the one who experienced ultimate exile, was forsaken, cursed, shamed, and endured the ultimate injustice on our behalf.
The Psalms were the language of Jesus
This is a picture of the Gospel and what Jesus perfectly endured to rescue us.
Look and see your suffering savior for you in this psalm
The exile of the Psalmist
Christ became an exile stepping down out of heaven as Paul says in Phil 2:6, without even a place to lay his head in Matthew 8:20waves and breakers
Christ was taunted and mocked
Suffered injustice and shame and rejection as the Suffering Servant of Psalm 53- Much more than the Psalmist even
Not mocked “where is your God but mocked even more “if you are god…take yourself down from there”
Hear the Psalmist in Psalm 42:7
Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your billows have swept over me.
There is a play on the hebrew words here
The “sounds of the joyful temple crowds replaced with the thunder of crushing waterfalls
Instead of the worship of the multitude passing over him in worship he is unable to get breath as the waves crush over him
The Expression deep calls to deep is not reassuring but the image of terror
Depth of sea in the Old Testament was the place of Evil and Chaos
Crushing pressure that only Christ would know in all of its terror
Praying in the garden his spirit was terrified to the point of trauma causing blood vessels to burst and seep through his pores as His soul was crushed in the will of the father and swept over by sorrow
Remember back to the deer on verge of collapse
Ribs showing with every breath
Crying out in thirst
See our savior The thirsting savior nailed to a tree, prophesied in Psalm 69:21, fulfilled in John 19:28
After this, when Jesus knew that everything was now finished that the Scripture might be fulfilled, he said, “I’m thirsty.”
Ribs showing with every struggling breathe as he suffocated in our place to buy back all that sin has stolen
But purchased for us a “firm foundation” in our salvation, and a future hope so that we can be like him in our afflictions set our face like flint, and for the joy set before us endure to the end.
We have to be anchored in what has been done to promise a future so when suffering still stings us but also to see it doesnt get the last word
Becasue a world of suffering is what every man and woman who wrote the 66 books of the bible knew
In 1 Peter the friend of Jesus is writing to people who have suffered and Peter knows it is going to get worse as Nero’s reign is growing in persecution of the church
It was bad and a storm of brutality is coming
Peter is not writing as a naive old man
1 Peter 1:3-12 Peter is wasting no time because he knows what is coming will either kill there faith or make them faithful even when Nero is lighting his courtyard with christians being burned alive
The Old curse needs something new to give us hope in the face of suffering
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead
Look at what he is saying
Because he looked at what sin has done and raged at it like a briddled horse in John 11 we don’t just have hope…we have a live and active hope because he killed the dragon when we rose from the grave
Because what God did for us in Christ and what he is doing to get us home the reality is this ….your suffering in this life has an expiration date
He goes on in 1 Peter 1:6-7
You rejoice in this, even though now for a short time, if necessary, you suffer grief in various trials so that the proven character of your faith—more valuable than gold which, though perishable, is refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
You rejoice in what has been done in verse 3 so that when suffering comes you have an anchor
That anchor is knowing that because the hero we need came we know what is coming
Suffering the curse has an expiration date
Because of what he has done to kill the curse in the past we are anchored to know this pain has an expiration date
Remember Lazarus from John we saw
In a flex to show he was the hero we need Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead
But Lazarus died again
In Mark 5 Jesus raises a little girl from death after the wails of a suffering dad
But she lived a long life but died again
We die in this life because of the darkness that came in Eden
We need a hero big enough to kill that or we are in trouble
if jesus is just a tylenol for our lives we have no hope that our ultimate suffering has been defeated
The Cross is where he killed the darkness
The hope of what was done there anchors us in suffering
It promises what nothing else can
The curse has been defeated
The curse we are under will be no more
Because what God did for us in Christ and what he is doing to get us home the reality is this ….your suffering in this life has an expiration date
Revelation gives us the promises of the happily ever after every day we get closer too
Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations, and there will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will worship him.
There will no longer be the curse of suffering because he suffered the ultimate suffering
Revelation 5 Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals [in other words, “Worthy are you to be the Lord of the unfolding of history”], for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed people for God
The one in complete control of the unfolding of your everyday is the one who loves you so much he was slaughtered to kill the dragon and get you home
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.
The old is passing away in the face of suffering because he is making all things new
Every day we suffer we are one step closer to this being all we know
And it isn’t out there somewhere
This very earth this very body will be made new
Becasue he got up so will I
So will everyone who is in Him
There is a picture of my grandpa standing over me when i am 3 or 4 helping me swing a baseball bat
I miss my grandpa
Something he told my dad kept me alive when my dad told me about it when I was suffering in my 20’s
I miss Him
But everyday I have missed him is one day closer I get to playing baseball with him again
We will have perfect bodies
He won’t have cancer anymore
I won’t have whatever kills me anymore
I can picture that day
My grandpa died as a follower of Jesus so there is a day coming soon when Our savior will be in a lawn chair watching us enjoy what he purchased with His blood
If this isn’t a reality we are wasting our time
But the end anchors us so that while we will suffer in this life I know that he is getting me home
He is the hero we long for
There is a book called not the way its supposed to be that is one of the most influental in my life
At the end the author says this
To speak of sin by itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way
What that means is this
To speak of suffering without the reality of the rest of the story is to miss the reslove of our hero to kill it
God has shown he will pay any price to kill what causes our suffering
Suffering is tenacious. Our tears seem unbeatable but they arent nearly as stubborn as God to kill it
The curse that causes suffering seems tenacious but it not half so ready to suffer to win
The cross says suffering doesn’t get the last word
Because of Christ our suffering has an expiration date
And it is coming hold fast to it