Why Is There Evil

All right We’re all good, okay,
so So when we began discussing this rotation my hope was to
bring something from Philippians Because that’s what I finished
preaching just recently just only a few weeks ago Finished
going through Philippians or maybe a month or two and now
at this point starting up in the Gospel of John. And it’s
interesting because Ron is preaching through John and Moses is preaching
through John. And I believe entirely independently,
all of us have decided to preach through John. And so I was talking
with our elders a couple of months ago saying, okay, I’m coming
up to the end of Philippians and I’ve got a couple of weeks
before I go into John, what would you like me to preach on? What
do you think I should preach on? There’s some, maybe a season
for some topical messages. And they suggest that, evangelism
training. And so what I began to work on
as I thought about that was really how to address the questions
that people are asking and how to answer them in a way that
makes sense to the world when we’re talking with the world
about who God is. And so I began a series on is there a God? Is
Jesus God? Is the Bible reliable? And working
on through. And last week I preached this
sermon on why is there evil? And so I’m looking forward to
bringing this word to you. It’s not a verse-by-verse sermon.
It’s more of a topical sermon. It’s not my normal style. And
I know that I’m going to place a church called Providence Bible
Church. And my hope and prayer is that I am bringing the word
in a way that aligns with the Reformed doctrines. I love singing
that hymn that we just sang a few minutes ago. in the sovereignty
of God. I’m hoping this sermon conforms
to that, because I don’t want to in any way undermine the good
work that Pastor Ron is doing here. So if you have your Bibles,
let’s turn to a Genesis chapter. Can you guys hear me OK? Is this
coming through here? Yes? All right. All right, that’s
good. Looking forward to being with
the elders here as we turn to there also, because on Friday
we’re going to be here at this church with the elders, coming
to all the various church elders going to come and meet, and also
looking forward to that training, that leadership training on the
31st that Pastor Ron is leading as well, and looking forward
to being a part of that too. So let’s read this passage, and
then let’s turn our hearts to the Lord in prayer, starting
in Genesis 3-1. It says, Now the serpent was
more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God
had made. And he said to the woman, indeed, has God said,
you shall not eat from any tree of the garden? The woman said
to the serpent, from the fruit of the trees of the garden we
may eat. But from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle
of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat from it, or
touch it, or you will die. The serpent said to the woman,
you surely will not die. For God knows that in that day
you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like
God, knowing good and evil. Father God, we come to you as
your people to look at the psalm and heavy topic of the nature
and reason for evil. And God, we know that you are
sovereign over all things. We know, Lord God, that our lives
are under the control of your hand.
And Lord, we know that we can trust you in everything. And
God, as we come to you, we ask that your word and your truth
might comfort us and encourage us and guide us. Lord, may we
be more confident in your nature and in your plan. And Lord, may
we be boldly bringing that word to the world around us. And so,
God, we lift up to you our hearts and our words. We lift up to
you this message, Lord God. And may, Lord, you use these
words to transform our understanding of you and your ways and your
plan. May we trust you more. And Lord, may we then be boldly
bringing that word into the world around us. So guide us, Lord
God. Guide our hearts and our minds
as we interact with your word. May your word teach us and lead
us. And may your spirit make us the
people you’ve called us to be. We love you and we praise you
and we submit ourselves to you in Jesus’s name. Amen. But during
my first year of college, I had this unusual ministry. I was
going to Moody Bible Institute in downtown Chicago. And every
Sunday, another student and I would ride on the subway from Chicago
all the way out to O’Hare International Airport. O’Hare was out in the
suburbs. And at the time, it was and still
is one of the busiest airports in the world. And in Terminal
2, it has a chapel. was open to anybody. And so they
allowed us and our little outreach team to come in every Sunday
and hold two or three or four church services for the people
who were in the airport. And we would hold these services
and we would share the gospel with whoever came. And we would
announce them throughout the entire airport. And so people
would come, if they especially had layovers, they would come
and hear us teach and proclaim God’s word. I remember one man
who came by distinctly. He was about 40, maybe 45 years
old. He was dressed in this kind of cool, trendy style for the
times. He had a black button-down shirt
on. He had black jeans on. He explained to us that he was
a professor of philosophy at a university. He had a doctorate
in philosophy. He came to our chapel because
he wanted us to answer his burning question, which was, if God is
real, why is there so much pain in the world? He reasoned that
a good God would not allow evil in the world. And so either God
wasn’t real, or God wasn’t good, or God wasn’t powerful enough
to stop evil. There I was. I was 20 years old.
I’d been a Christian for three years. I was in my first year
of Bible college, and here I was talking with a man who had a
doctorate in philosophy, and who thought my ideas about God
were laughable. So I answered the question the
best I could. But I remember him saying to me, well, if that
is true about God, then I won’t worship him. I’d rather be in
hell. He talked for a while. Eventually,
he left. I never saw him again. But I never forgot that conclusion. I cannot, I will not, worship
a God who would allow so much evil in this world. It’s a question
of philosophy. And philosophy puts it as a syllogism.
If God is good, he will stop evil. Either God is not real,
God is not good, or God is not powerful enough to stop it, and
therefore, he does not deserve our worship. Now, that’s the
syllogism, the logical syllogism. But with all syllogisms, the
question is driven by the assumptions of the premise. And the first
premise is, if God is good, he will stop evil. And on that premise,
the syllogism either hangs or falls. In our mind, it kind of
makes sense, right? When we think about that and
think about these things, we’re talking with this doctrine of
philosophy, evil is bad, right? God is good. And therefore a
good God will stop evil. But the Bible offers us another
line of reasoning. And this morning I’d like to
address the fundamental question of why is there evil in this
world? It’s not an easy question to answer. There are many possible
ways we can interpret scriptures. But the Bible gives us an answer
that is clear and straightforward. But it’s not one that people
like to hear. If a person rejects the Word
of God, they will also reject what God’s Word says about evil.
It takes time to explain and unpack the answer. We may not
like what God has to say. But we, as God’s people, are
God’s ambassadors in the world. And we need to be able to understand
and explain why is there evil and what is God doing about it
around us. And so let’s start with our first
point this morning, which is simply, does evil exist? Because
that’s a question on the table, depending on some philosophy,
some world religions. We don’t have to look very far
to see that evil does exist. We see evil in the Middle East
and the things that happen on a regular basis there. We see
evil in how governments and organizations will sometimes abuse their power. We see evil in all the choices
people make. Sometimes they do what is good,
sometimes they do what is evil. We see them doing evil things
they do, We see the evil doing evil and things that they don’t
do. And so we are surrounded by evil. It’s a part of life. And because it’s such a daily
part of life, we would think that God’s Word would somewhere
speak to it. And indeed it does. Scripture
speaks of evil essentially from cover to cover. The first two
chapters don’t contain any evil, but from Genesis 3 onward, the
passage we just read, the Bible is really the record of the effects
of evil and how a righteous God deals with it. And so let’s look
to God’s Word and what it has to say. I’ve got a few passages
that we’re going to jump around in. Let’s hopefully have our
Bibles to Genesis chapter 1. We’re going to look at 1 and
2 and 3 and 4 and 5 quickly. Back in Genesis 1, we see that
God creates everything perfect. Genesis 1, verse 31, God created
everything perfect. There was no sin, no sickness,
no death, no pain, no evil. But then in Genesis 2, we see
a warning from God to Adam. He says in verses 16 and 17,
basically, do not disobey me. Do not eat from this tree. Do
not bring evil into this world. If he did, he would die. But
we just read a minute ago in Genesis 3 that Adam and Eve rebelled
against God and sin entered into creation. And then right after
that, in Genesis chapter 4, we see the effects of evil when
their son Cain kills another one of their sons, Abel. And
then in Genesis 5, at a glance at this, this is a profound and
harrowing account of the descent from Adam to Noah. And verse
after verse in this lineage here ends with the phrase, and he
died. Verse 8, all the days of Seth,
another son of Adam and Eve, were 912 years and he died. Verse
11, all the days of Enosh were 905 years and he died. Verse 14, all the
days of Kenan were 910 years and he died. And God’s Word grinds verse after
verse. They keep on going into our understanding
that the truth is our sin causes a separation between us and the
life-giving presence of a good and holy God. And so the pain
and death in our world is the result of sin and evil. And the Bible goes on to demonstrate
chapter after chapter, account after account, that the more
man turns from God, the more sin abounds, and the more evil
exists in our world. Look at Genesis 5, I’m sorry,
6-5. See what God saw in this world. Genesis 6-5 says, Then the Lord
saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that
every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Not the greatest diagnosis on
the nature of man, only evil continually. And that was the
state of mankind really up till Noah. But then Noah’s story,
right? And this is where things change,
maybe, but no. See, Noah finds grace, and as
the Lord, the song goes, he builds an ark, and the Lord saves him,
but destroys the rest of mankind through the flood to show that
God hates sin and judges sin. But that doesn’t get rid of the
presence of evil. And Genesis 8, 21, if we glance at that, This is after the flood. This
is after the waters we see. This is after the dove comes
back to the olive branch, after Noah unpacks his wife and his
family and the animals from the ark. This is after Noah worships
God from the ground that was cleansed of the presence of man
and his sin. And God declares still in the
middle of that verse, the intent of Genesis 8.21, the intent of
man’s heart is evil from his youth. Centuries later, Solomon, who
pursued every possible route of happiness in his day, he concludes
in Ecclesiastes 9-3, we don’t have to turn there, but Ecclesiastes
9-3 says, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity
is in their hearts throughout their lives. And so that is the
conclusion of scripture. Man’s hearts are full of evil
and their evil drives them to insanity. It is always irrational
for us to choose to sin. against God. And so rather than
shying away from this topic of evil, the Bible demonstrates
it chapter after chapter after chapter. Evil exists. And it exists in the world all
around us. But the Bible does come to a
conclusion. And if you happen to have read
the Bible through in a year this past year, then it was only a
few weeks ago that you came to the end of the chapters of Revelation.
And Revelation itself was a pretty tough book to read. But it concludes
with the coming of the new heaven and the new earth and new Jerusalem.
And it says in Revelation 21.4 that God will wipe away every
tear from their eyes. There will be no more, longer
any death or no longer any mourning or crying or pain. And we know
that in God’s sovereign plan, the end of this era will bring
an end to the effects of evil and the effects of the curse.
All that will be eradicated. And so the message of the Bible
is that although evil exists, It is temporary. And our pain-filled
existence will come to an end. A new era will dawn where everything
will willingly and obediently follow God’s laws. And in that
day, there will no longer be any sin or pain or death. And we will be free of all those
things that rip joy from our life. So that’s our future. But until those days, we live
in evil days. We cannot deny that evil exists.
It does exist, it’s all around us. But this then begs the question,
why? Why does evil exist in the first
place? Why did God allow something to
exist that causes so much pain in this world? And that brings
us to our second point. Point number two is why does
evil exist? Does it exist? Yes. Point number two, why? Since
the dawn of mankind, People have sought to answer this question
with various theories. Here are some religious theories.
Buddhism says that evil is the result of people trying to be
individuals. If we lose our self, there will
be no one to do evil, no one to experience evil. We just lose
our self. Taoism says that we create evil
by thinking in terms of categories. The minute we think of something
as good or beautiful, we have automatically created the opposite
category. Christian science says that there is no evil. The only
evil is the fact that we think that there is evil. Although
these theories sound nice, they do not bear with reality. A little
child who has been abused did not create evil by thinking in
terms of categories. They did not selfishly demand
that their individuality be recognized. They were not wrong to think
that their pain was real. So that’s some theories from
religion. Modern science presents probably
the dominant view. And they say that pain exists,
evil exists, really because life is meaningless. We are here by
chance. We’re here as the product of
millions of years of survival of the fittest. And so the things
we see going on around us are really just that some people
are still doing whatever they want to get ahead. We might call
it evil, but it’s not evil in a moral sense. It’s just random
disasters. It’s man-made wars. It’s whatever
we see play on the evening news. But it’s not evil in a moral
sense. It’s just random, chaotic, and tragic. So those are some
theories on why evil exists. But they all fail to explain
the reality as we see it. And let’s turn now to what the
Bible says about evil. The Bible declares that some
things are evil. It is not just a concept. There
are things that are morally corrupt. In Genesis 38, 7, there’s a guy
named Ur. And Ur was evil in the sight
of the Lord. We should probably learn from that, not to name
our kids Ur. And so the Lord took his life. In Genesis 50,
20, Joseph said to his brothers who were sold into slavery, you
meant evil against me, but God meant good. Judges 3, 7 is one
of countless passages that speak of how the people did what was
evil in the sight of the Lord. And so the Bible says that evil
exists and there are some actions and some people and some events
which we can call evil. Words can be evil. Motives can
be evil. Spirits can be evil. Groups of
people can be evil. A city can be evil. Proverbs
1.16 says sinners run to evil. Proverbs 14.16 says wise men
turn away from evil. Proverbs 8.13 says to fear the
Lord hate evil. So evil exists, and evil is moral
in nature. And scripture tells us that God
hates evil, and God’s people hate evil. So the question then
remains, well if God hates it, why does it still exist? So to
answer that question, let’s dive into the nature of evil. When
the Bible speaks of good and evil, it sometimes uses a metaphor
of light and darkness, which is in John 3.19. judgment that
the light has come into the world and men loved the darkness rather
than the light and their deeds were evil. Light came into the
world. Men loved darkness. They didn’t
love goodness. They loved darkness because their
deeds were evil. And so several times in the Bible,
there’s many other passages, the Bible equates goodness with
light and evil with darkness. And I believe this is because
there is something to the corresponding nature of light and darkness
and righteousness and evil. Let me try to explain how this
works. The Hebrew idea of righteousness
is rooted in the Hebrew word tzaddik. Tzaddik means to conform
to an ethical or moral standard. It’s rooted in the idea of existing
according to an intended design. So to be righteous means to lack
nothing that is necessary. And therefore, something that
is righteous is perfect and complete, it is pure, it lacks nothing. And so for the purpose of our
discussion this morning, righteousness is, to be righteous means to
lack nothing necessary for perfection. Now the topic of righteousness
is gonna be many pages in the dictionary, so one sentence is
not complete. But in terms of the question of evil, righteousness
means to lack nothing necessary for perfection. Here’s an analogy
from a piano. If righteousness was a piano,
a totally righteous piano would have every key and every string
just the way it’s supposed to be. We’ve got this piano right
here. We’d have all the pieces. No key would be missing. No string
would be missing. No string would be in the wrong
position. All the pedals would work properly. Every component
would be perfectly where it is supposed to be. It would be in
its proper arrangement doing what it’s supposed to do so that
it could play all the beautiful music it was supposed to play.
Righteousness is the totality. of all necessary perfection.
If a piano needed one more key to be complete, if it just had
87 keys instead of 88, then that piano would be incomplete in
its perfection. It would be incomplete in its
righteousness. And it would therefore then be
unrighteous and at some level incapable of perfectly playing
whatever we would want to play on it. A righteous thing is perfect. It is complete. It needs nothing
more. It is totally good and totally
true, totally just and totally pure. And everything that it
does then is likewise totally good and totally true and totally
just and totally pure. So here’s where all this then
begins to pull together. Something that is righteous has perfection.
But to make something unrighteous, what you do is you do something
that damages or removes perfection. Now tying this back to light
and darkness, similarly, Light is the presence of photons. They
are real things. Light is an actual real thing,
but darkness is not. There are no particles swimming
out there called darktons, right? Nobody learned about darktons
in school. Darkness is just the absence of photons. Darkness
is the absence of light. Even when they talk about dark
matter and dark energy, that’s not saying it emits darkness.
They just say they don’t emit light. You can buy a flashlight,
right? But go to a store, you buy a
flashlight, you shine it around a room. But you don’t go to a
store and buy a flash dart, right? They don’t sell flash darts at
Home Depot that emit darkness. Even if you could, it wouldn’t
extinguish the light if you just cover it up. So here’s how these
analogies help us to understand the origin of evil. The way to
darken something is to remove photons. The way to produce unrighteousness
is to remove perfection. And we know from Scripture, when
God created the universe, He created it perfectly good. There
was no single flaw. It contained the totality of
perfection. As we said, Genesis 1.31 says, God saw all that He
made, and behold, it was very good. Now that statement comes
at the end of creation. It was very good because it was
now perfect. But the only time we see in the
first two chapters of Genesis, the first time we see that something
was not good was when man was alone. God said of Adam, it is
not good for man to be alone. Why was it not good? Because
Adam lacked something. What did he lack? He lacked a
wife. And so Eve was created. And then
creation was perfect. It lacked nothing. It was perfectly
good. And so now this brings us to the origin of evil. Everything
was perfect. Where did evil come from? And sometimes people say,
well, it came from Satan. But that just pushes the question
a little bit further back. It didn’t come from Satan. The answer lies
in what we’ve been talking about. When Adam sinned, he introduced
evil into this world by removing perfection. Yes, Satan was there,
and yes, he was a part of it. But Ezekiel 28 explains that
this process had already happened to Satan, too, that we’re about
to explain. Evil did not come into existence because it was
somehow created. It came into existence because
something that was perfect chose to do something that was not
perfect. It’s like taking a bright Coleman
lantern and going out and camping in a dark campsite and then turning
down that lantern. That lantern, turning it down,
doesn’t create darkness. It just diminishes the light
that was once there. And so when Adam sinned, there
was not something new in creation. There was actually something
less in creation. Perfection no longer had all
the necessary ingredients. Something was now missing. And
that something was obedience. And when obedience is lacking,
perfection is lacking. When perfection is lacking, evil
is present. And so since that first sin of
the garden, there’s been a lack of perfection throughout creation.
And therefore, ever since then, evil has been present among us. That leads us to another question
then. Why didn’t God just create Adam without the capacity? We’re
to say there’s a whole lot of pain, right? If Adam couldn’t
sin in the first place. And this goes back to the idea
of righteousness and perfection. Everything that God does is perfect.
It is a logical impossibility for a perfect God to do something
that is not perfect. God always does what is perfect. So when God created Adam, he
created Adam perfectly. And because he was perfect, He
had certain ingredients that composed perfection. We go to
a paint store. We go to Home Depot. And we look
around and we say, OK, I’m looking for paint. I want you to look
at all the paint swatches. And you pull one off, and it’s
seafoam green. And you bring that paint chip over to the paint
counter. And you say, I want seafoam green
from this brand. And they will have a precise
recipe of all the pigments they use to make that color. They’ll
put it under the little machine. They’ll press the button. They’ll
type in the code. and it’ll drop in all these pigments, sometimes
it’ll just drop and drip, and they will make a product that
corresponds perfectly to the standard because it has all the
proper ingredients of the exact measure. In the same way, a morally
perfect being has precise ingredients. And Genesis 1.26 says that we
were created in the image of God. And that’s a huge topic
right there, what is the image of God and what do we have and
what attributes of God do we have? There’s many of them. But
here’s a few that God has that we have. What it means to be
created in His image and how we like God. God has a mind.
He has thoughts. And so do we. God has a will. He intends to do things. And
so do we. God performs actions. And so
do we. And so when you put all these
together, they comprise the ability to choose. Something that thinks
and desires and acts inherently must choose to act. And so a
perfect being has the capacity to choose. Now sometimes we are
uncomfortable with the idea of choosing because we understand
God’s election and that we are spiritually dead without God’s
grace. But Adam was created in a state of moral perfection with
the capacity to choose. And so when we choose, and when
Adam chose, it is more perfect for him to choose the right thing
willingly. It was more perfect for him to
choose what was right willingly. more glory to God. Let me give
an example that John Piper will use sometimes. I’ve been married
to my wife for 18 years. I love my wife, and it’s good
that I love my wife. But if in these 18 years I never
expressed my love for her, that love, though may being real,
would not be perfect. It would be still yet better
to have love that I express. I love her but don’t express
it. My love is not complete. It’s not all that it could be.
It lacked something and therefore was not perfect. So expressed
love is better than silent love. Now, let’s add one more wrinkle
to it. Imagine I had no choice in this matter. Imagine I bought
my wife, Corinne, flowers every day, rain or shine, but imagine
I did because it was the law of the land. The law was every
man must buy his wife flowers every day. Imagine every time
I gave them to her, she says, oh, thank you, you should have,
and I say, I know, the law made me. What kind of love would that
be? Would that be a perfect expression
of my love? No. It wouldn’t be joyful for
me, and it wouldn’t be joyful for her. Perfect, joyful love
says, I love you, and I want to give these to you. And so
loving my wife and showing her my love is better than not, and
is better than being forced to. And so God created Adam perfect.
And being perfect meant Adam had the capacity to choose. And
God warned him not to choose to disobey, but Adam did choose
to disobey God. And that choice introduced a
separation between Him and God. And that separation put Adam,
and therefore then all of Adam’s descendants, into a cursed existence.
And this cursed existence includes pain and suffering and death. Not just a physical death, but
a spiritual death. And that death has then been
passed down from one descendant to the next, we saw in Genesis
5, up to our day. And Paul explains in Ephesians
2.1, that we were dead in our trespasses and sins. And mankind
is dead in their trespasses and sins, separated from the goodness
and love and glory and holiness of God. And that is why they
do evil all around us. So let’s review what we’ve covered
so far. Why does evil exist? Evil is not a thing that was
created. It is the absence of perfection. When God created
Adam and Eve, he gave them the ability to choose. When they
chose, they chose to be less than perfect. And so evil does
exist and it does persist Because creation is no longer perfect
and we live in an imperfect world where imperfect things act imperfectly. So that explains the origin of
evil, but why does God still allow it? Why doesn’t he just
bring it to an end? And that brings us to our last
question this morning. Point number three, why does
God allow evil to still exist? Going back to that question posed
by the philosopher that I met at the airport. He said, a good
God would not allow evil to exist. But evil does exist. And either
God is not good, or not real, or not powerful. And therefore,
we should not worship him. Now, that might seem like a logical
conclusion. But before we come to it, we
need to re-examine the first premise. Is it automatically
necessary that a good God will immediately stop evil from existing? That’s the question. Is it automatically
necessary? that a good God will immediately stop evil from existing. The Bible answers this question
by saying that God temporarily allows evil because he has a
redemptive purpose for it. God temporarily allows evil because
he has a redemptive purpose for it. Evil is not necessary, but
now that it is here, God in his sovereignty will cause good to
come out of it. We see this in several places
in the Bible. after Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery.
He said to them, as we saw in Genesis 50-20, what you meant
for evil, God meant for good. You were doing evil, but God
was a part of that, doing it for good. God, who is all-knowing
and all-powerful and sovereign over all the events of man, God
knew those events would happen in Joseph’s life. God knew Joseph’s
own family would sin against him and seek his death and throw
him into a pit and ultimately sell him into slavery. All that
was evil. But God converted that evil to
good. And God caused that event to
bring about the redemption and the salvation of all the Jewish
people. See, the Jewish people, when they went to Egypt, they
became then captive in Egypt. And then they were released from
Egypt, and then they came out into the world and went to the
promised land. Up to that point, when Joseph
was captive in Egypt himself, he was there as a slave suffering
But because of that time, he then became promoted to rule
the land and gather food for the famine. He rescued all of
his family from the famine. He rescued all the coming generations
from the famine and the consequences of it. And not only that, even
the people around them, the surrounding people were able to be fed because
of Joseph and what Joseph had done. Ultimately, the Jews were
rescued. And because they continue to
exist, the prophecies concerning them and the Messiah continued.
And the Jews produced the Messiah, and the Messiah eventually redeemed
all of his people. So evil exists in the world,
but God has a redemptive plan for it. What are some of those
redemptive plans? I’d like to talk about a few
of these redemptive plans. There’s many I could have written
down, but I’ve got a handful here. And the first one comes
from Isaiah 45. Let’s turn to our Bibles, Isaiah 45. Isaiah 45 to me is one of the
more important chapters in the book of Isaiah. It’s actually
cited many times in the New Testament. And if we were to read every
verse, we would understand more of what Paul is talking about
in Romans 9 and Philippians 2 and other passages. Talk about some redemptive plans
of God with our third point here. And the first one is that evil
allows us to see the righteousness of God. evil allows us to see
the righteousness of God. And this long passage actually
begins back in chapter 44, but it ends with this courtroom scene,
where all of creation is standing before God, and they see what
God is doing, and they realize that He alone is righteous. Now,
back earlier in the chapter, things start to heat on up. He
is declaring who He is. He’s calling people to leave
their idols and follow Him. And He says in verse seven, if
you glance down there, He says, I am the Lord, and there is no
other, back in verse six, The One forming light and creating
darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity. I am the
Lord who does all these things. And so clearly here, God is saying
He is very much involved in the events of this world. And in
verse 9, Isaiah, or the Lord, anticipates the common response
of the people who would hear this and quarrel with God. That’s
where we see Paul citing this in Romans, where the clay is
arguing with the potter. What are you doing? And he answers their arguments
starting in verse 20. If you could answer verse 20. He says, gather yourselves and
come. Draw near together you fugitives
of the nations. They have no knowledge who carry
about their wooden idols and pray to a God who cannot save.
Basically saying, come out all you idol worshipers, all you
people who thought you were rejecting me and following something that
was better. Verse 21, declare and set forth your case. Indeed,
let them consult together. Who has announced this from old?
Who has announced these prophecies I’ve just given to you? Who has
long since declared it? Is it not I, the Lord? There
is no other God besides me, a righteous God and a Savior. There is none
except me. And in verse 22, we see the goodness
and grace of God. He says, turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth. For I am God and there is no
other. And so God is calling all the
people from the nations to set forth their case before Him.
And when the people compare their actions and their false gods
to the true God, they realize that throughout history, only
God was truly righteous. Then look at the promise in verse
23. This will sound familiar to us, because Paul cites this
in Philippians. He says, to me, every knee will bow, every tongue
will swear allegiance, and they will say of me, only in the Lord
are righteousness and strength. Righteousness and power and look
where it goes on to say men will come to him and all who are angry
at him Will be put to shame The people who thought that they
were good and God was not People who heard of God’s sovereignty
back in verse 7 and concludes that he must be doing evil and
the author of evil all these people will have to declare that
he alone does what is right as he alone is righteous and And
the philosopher who said that he would not worship God because
of the evil in this world, that very philosopher will experience
the truth of this passage. He will one day conclude that
God alone is righteous. Going on, another redemptive
purpose of God and evil is that evil shows us we are separated
from a good God. And back in Genesis 3, God sends
Adam and Eve out of the garden. And from that first sin, mankind
has been separated from God, and we’ve been separated from
God and His life, His life-giving spirit, His life, and so we die.
We are separated from His protection. He still has grace and common
grace, but we still have pain. We are separated from His perfection,
and so we then have sin. Evil shows us that we are separated
from God. But even with this separation
from God, God is still amazingly gracious. and blesses us with
countless beautiful things in this world. My wife just had
a baby, and I’m probably partial, but babies are beautiful, right?
Mountains are beautiful. Mathematics and physics, especially
when you see the diagrams that are drawn, they’re beautiful.
And because God still blesses us with beauty and goodness around
us, if there was no effect of sin and evil. We actually might
prefer to stay here in this existence, which is still not what God intended
to be, which is in glory. Pain and suffering keep us from
being too attached to this world, despite all the many blessings
of God in our lives. When I was a little child, my
mother once took my sister and I to a little community park
that had these swing sets. And we happily played on these
swing sets. I actually don’t remember this, but my mom has
cited it many times in my life. We were playing these swing sets
and it became time to leave and my mom had plans to take us someplace
that was even better than the swing sets. But because we loved
those swings so much and we couldn’t envision anything else, we cried
because we didn’t want to go. We had no idea what it was that
she had planned for us. In the same way, this world has
many blessings, but it is not the perfect existence God has
created us for. And if it was nothing but goodness
without that presence of evil, without the judgment on sin,
we would love it so much that we would not understand that
this is still not yet what God created us for. And we would
want this more than we would want to be with Him. Along the same lines, evil shows
us God’s displeasure. If we had no pain and suffering
in the world, it would be hard for us to say that God hates
sin, right? He’d be blessing it all around us. There was no
pain, there was no judgment, No, no, no difficulty. We would
understand when the Bible warns us about God’s condemnation on
sin and upon us. If we are sinners before him,
we wouldn’t have the warnings of judgment and condemnation,
but the presence of evil allows us to, to heed these warnings
of scripture. It even gives us a foretaste
of what hell will be like. And it gives us time to repent.
Good friend of mine once said that if we are in Christ, These
days are the worst we’ll ever see. If we are outside of Christ,
these days are the best we’ll ever see. We have a foretaste
of the pain and judgment of hell and we have time to repent. Likewise,
evil allows us to see the foolishness of our ways. All the way back
to Adam in the garden, we don’t, we’re blind to our own foolishness.
We are masters of justifying our own actions. And if it’s
left to ourselves, we would think that our ways are just as good,
if not better, than God’s ways. We say, look, all the good that
comes from my ways, yeah, I blew God off, but all this good has
come because of what I have done. But the very fact that our ways
produce evil shows us that our ways are not best. We’re like
that Wile E. Coyote cartoon we may have seen. It’s where, you know, Wile E. Coyote goes off and buys some
Acme products, some ingenious little thing. He sure is going
to finally catch this roadrunner. Chases that roadrunner, thinks
he’s so smart. It’s only going over the edge
of the cliff. It’s only in the free fall that we realize God’s
ways were better than ours. We weren’t so smart after all.
And we begin to see that we need to trust God and not ourselves. Similarly, evil keeps us praying
to God. The very presence of evil in
our lives causes us to call out to God and cry out to Him and
rely upon Him. The only things, this is a heavy
thought we gotta remember, the only things that count for eternity,
the only things that will go into heaven are things that are
perfect. Heaven is a place of perfection.
But Isaiah 64, six says, everything we do is laced with sin. The
only work that lasts for eternity is the work that God does in
us and through us. It’s gotta be God’s work for
it to go into glory. And so if everything we did worked
out beautifully, then we would never ask God to fill our work
with his spirit. We would never be engaging in
work that lasts for eternity. Our lives would have no eternal
value. They might seem good, but there’d be no eternal value
to our lives. But the presence of evil keeps
us on our knees before God. It keeps us abiding in fellowship
so that He might be the one who does the work and blesses and
fills our labors. And evil keeps us on our knees,
praying to God to connect with Him and His purposes, so that
we engage in work that lasts for eternity, because it is really
the work that God is doing in us and through us. So there is
redemptive value, even to evil. When we stand before the Lord,
we’ll understand this clearly. We’ll see that what He has done
and why. And like Isaiah 45 says, we will
join with the countless throngs that say, you alone are righteous. You alone are Lord. But there’s one more way that
God redeems evil. Evil shows us God’s redemptive power over
anything. See, evil cannot thwart the goodness
of God. God took the greatest evil that
ever occurred in history and he used it to bring about the
greatest good that has ever occurred in history. God made the best
out of it. Now, if you were to walk around
the streets and say, you know, what is the most evil thing you
can imagine? People would talk about all kinds of things that
they would suspect are evil. But the worst evil that this
world has ever seen was one who spread love and goodness and
joy, was tried in a court and found innocent, but executed
anyway. Obviously, it’s Jesus, and Jesus
wasn’t just innocent. He was our loving, gracious God
in the flesh. And Jesus’s death was not just
an execution. It was a cruel torture designed
to produce the greatest amount of agony. And it was not just
cruel torture. It was done to the delight of
a jeering and angry and mocking mob. They were celebrating and
delighting in the torture that they were inflicting upon the
innocent one who spread love and goodness in God’s grace.
That was the most evil that this world has ever seen. And yet
God’s holiness and glory and wisdom was able to bring the
greatest good that this world has ever seen from the greatest
evil it has ever done. In Christ’s death, he purchased
the redemption of our souls. He satisfied the justice of God. He propitiated the wrath of God. He exchanged His righteousness
for our sin. He took our sin upon himself
and he clothed us with his perfection. The wisdom of God ordained that
that evil would be done to his son to bring about the salvation
of his people. God is not afforded by evil. God is greater than evil. and
his redemptive power will bring good out of the evil that is
around us. The gospel is the only message
that makes sense of this world. You see, not only is this world
filled with evil, but it also is filled with goodness. God
is a loving God, and he is one of mercy and grace and goodness,
and he spreads that into the world around us. C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of
Narnia series, and I’m sure we are familiar with him, Before
C.S. Lewis wrote them though, he was
an atheist professor at Oxford. He writes that as an atheist,
the question that bothered him most was not why is there evil
in this world? That was not the most difficult
question because he saw that at least his understanding of
evolution would give an answer to that. The question he could
not answer was, why was there so much good in the world? You see, Before he came to Christ,
he could understand that man’s inhumanity was causing evil,
but that should have caused our total destruction eons ago. Chaos
and time and chance were just a thin veneer, an unsatisfying
explanation to why nature abounds with so much goodness and life
and joy. Why do people do good to strangers
on the street to their own detriment? Why does music move us to joy? And the lack of satisfying answers
to why there was so much good led C.S. Lewis to consider that
a good God was behind the goodness in this world. So for the person
who honestly mulls these kinds of questions over, the hardest
question of philosophy is not why is there evil, but why is
there any good at all? And only the Bible provides the
answer. There is goodness because God
is good, and there is evil because we have violated the law of God. If God is so good, why doesn’t
he do something about it? The answer is, he has. He has. God in his wisdom has provided
the only solution that redeems people from evil, brings judgment
upon their sin, restores righteousness and perfection, and creates a
future realm where his creation willingly and joyfully obeys
him and walks in his grace and his peace. That’s what the Bible says about
evil. Now, throughout our time this
morning, we’ve described evil as a lack of perfection, and
indeed it is. But we tend to think of evil
as only for really evil people, right? Like Hitler, and Gaius
and Martius, and Darth Vader. But the root of evil is sin.
And sin invades the heart of every person. Romans 3, 23 says,
for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of
God. And that’s the reality for every one of us. Every one of
us needs to recognize that at some point in our life we have
disobeyed God. We have sinned against Him. The
sin of Adam brought destruction on Him. That sin brings destruction
upon us. Our sin brings destruction upon
us. And Romans 6.23 says the wages of sin is death. And so
the only solution to this problem of sin in our lives is the Gospel.
And the gospel is the proclamation of the good news. That when Jesus
went to the cross, he went as an innocent substitute. He paid
the penalty that was due for the damage we caused by our sin.
And he offers us redemption from this evil world so that we might
be with him forever. And so if there’s any of us here
this morning who can see that their sin has created a separation
between them and God, You can turn to God right now for forgiveness
and redemption. Romans 10, 13 says, whoever will
call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. You can call upon
God right now. And scripture promises that God
will hear your prayer and save your soul. And my prayer would
be that each one of us would walk out of here today forsaking
the evil of this world, righteously and turning and embracing Christ
who is our pure and holy Lord and Savior and walking with him.
Why does evil exist? Evil is not the direct creation
of God. It is the absence of perfection. It came into this
world when Adam sinned against God. So God hates evil, but he
has a plan for it. He has a solution for it. And
one day we will all stand before him. We will understand his purposes
and will declare that you alone are righteous. You alone are
Lord. Heavenly Father, we declare that
you alone are righteous. And Lord, as we sang this morning,
Lord, you take the pains of our world and you convert them to
treasures of gold for glory. And Lord God, we know that you
have a sovereign plan of our lives and we know that we can
trust you. And Lord, even though we may not understand all of
your dealings, Lord, we know that you only do what is good.
And we know, Lord God, that when we stand before you in glory
and look upon the the timeline of our lives and the timeline
of the history of mankind. We will see and know that you
alone are righteous. You alone are Lord. You alone
are good. And so Father God, we come to
you and we declare that we ourselves are not good. We are not perfect. We are tainted and laced with
sin. Lord God, our lives are imperfect and we have sinned
against you. And Lord, we put our faith in Christ to be our
Savior. We trust in God and the cross. He took the punishment for our
sins. He took your wrath that we deserved. He paid the debt
that we owed for our sins against you. And we trust in what Christ
has done, and we ask you to be our Lord and Savior. We ask that
your spirit might fill us. God, be with each of us. May we understand you more rightly,
more purely, more faithfully. Lord, may we love you more and
celebrate you more and praise you more. And God, may you bless
our church family, this church family. Lord, may we be your
people who proclaim your truth boldly and confidently that we
might go into this world around us bringing the message of God. God, may we be faithful
to that message, to be faithful to you. We love you and praise
you. Thanks, Russ. As we close our
service this morning, if you would take your hymnals, turn
to 644. May the mind of Christ my Savior
live in me from day to day. Let’s stand together and sing.