Ask A Pastor
Does God Care?
By Pastor Mark McNees
This message was originally given at Element3 Church in Tallahassee FL. To download this message’s corresponding PowerPoint, audio, and artistic elements for free please visit www.element3.org.
Questions:
1. Why does God let bad things happen?
2. The question I always hear from non-believers is if there is a God why does He allow such bad things to happen? I have heard the God gives us free will response, that it helps strengthen us and bring us together, and that it tests your faith. I have to admit that even I have been a Christian all my life, I still don’t know exactly how to respond to this question.
Today’s subject is, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” As Christians, a lot of times we feel like we need to come up with an answer and sometimes we give quick answers or we come off trite. I think that there are people in this room who are dealing with real pain and real hurt and the last thing they need is a trite answer that is not really based in scripture but we just feel like we should have an answer so we come up with it. Today hopefully we can go beyond a bumper sticker answer and acknowledge real hurt and real pain and allow healing to take place and to know that we don’t always have to have an answer. If we speak for God even though we don’t know, we are in a very dangerous place.
Let’s Pray:
Dear God, as we look at today and this huge subject which is the nature of bad things happening to good people, I know that when I read these questions, the question really is, “Do you care about my suffering, do you care about us on earth?” We love you Lord in Jesus Name, Amen.
A lot of times you always hear the question, “Does God exist?” I kind of look at that question in the same light as the question, “Is Pluto a planet?” Really it doesn’t make any difference in our lives if Pluto is a planet or not. Many times we try to answer that question, “Does God exist”, but the real question is, “Does God care?” If God is a God of the deists and he made this clock and wound it up and let it role, who cares? If He doesn’t care about us, why should we care about Him? The real heart of the question is does God care about me when I am going through suffering, and when I am in pain, not does God exist. There are two realities that we need to grab onto in order for us to go on this path to understand the answer to this question. We are part of a bigger story than just ourselves; if you think you are the beginning and the end this sermon will not make a lot of sense to you. The other thing is that everything God does is fueled by love. For us to go anywhere, we need to start there. We are part of a story bigger than ourselves.
We are part of a bigger story than just ours.
John 11:4 But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.”
That statement has made some of your minds say why would God allow suffering to bring glory to me? You need to go to the discussion group to get that. We are part of a story that is much larger than ourselves and there is a lot more going on than what we can experience, what we can sense, what we can taste, and what we can hear.
John 11:32-35 When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked them. They told him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus wept.
Have you ever been in a situation where there was so much pain and hurt that you just had anger and you just couldn’t handle the hopelessness around you? It is interesting that Jesus had this emotion, I don’t think He was angry at them or the situation, I think He was just angry about the place where the world had come to that point. It just hurt Him and troubled him deeply.
John 11:35 is the most important verse in our search today. It is the shortest verse in the Bible and the most important. The pain was so great that the people around him were in so much pain and hurt that the God of the universe cried because he was overwhelmed with their pain. The next thing we need to hold onto is that everything God does is fueled by love. It is kind of interesting, a lot of times we look at Jesus in the New Testament and then we look at the Old Testament God and we see the wrath God and we think somewhere along the line God became nice in the New Testament. The truth is the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament and there is total consistency. Everything the God of the Old Testament did was fueled by love. Jesus weeping in John 11:35 is the same God who created the universe and sent the plagues and brought people back to him through adversity.
Everything God does is fueled by love.
Exodus 3:7-8a Then the Lord told him, “I have certainly seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because of their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land.
Moses sees a burning bush and he is curious. He is curious about this bush not being consumed so his curiosity overwhelmed him and he went over and see what was going on. God is not aloof. God is concerned about our suffering. And it is kind of interesting that a lot of times Christians are told not to be curious. Curiosity led Moses to God and it may lead you to God. Maybe you are curious about E3 and maybe because of your curiosity and a fertile mind that God has given you to seek Him, you will encounter God today. God tells Moses that he has seen the suffering of His people and this is why He is there, to relieve their suffering because what He does is fueled by love and bringing people into relationship with Him. Maybe you are not convinced that everything God does is fueled by love. Maybe you think in the Old Testament people are afraid and oppressed. There is poetry that reads like a love letter and you wonder if this is the words of someone who is oppressed and afraid?
Psalm 145:8-9 The Lord is merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. The Lord is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all His creation.
God created everything so if He showers compassion on all His creation, that means nothing is excluded. God is slow to anger, He has unfailing love, He is fair to everyone and He showers love on all creation. These are not the words of someone is duress.
Psalm 119:64 Oh Lord, your unfailing love fills the earth.
Have you ever flown into Los Angeles during the day? You just see this blanket of fog. On bad days, you can hardly see the city. Sometimes the skyscrapers pop out of the fog or sometimes it is thicker than that. You land and it is kind of funny because you have this unique perspective of the fog filling the LA basin. You could change the psalm to say that the fog fills the LA basin. You get pictures from LA inside the smog and it looks blue and you see people running around and sucking smog into their lungs and they don’t realize or understand the extent of the pollution of the air in the LA basin. Because of our perspective, we have been in God’s love for so long and we haven’t been outside of it, we don’t realize that the whole earth is filled with God’s love. We need to start in those two places, we are part of a story greater than ourselves and that everything God does is fueled by love. So suffering stems from three areas. A lot of times people say I can’t believe in God because there is so much suffering in the world. Who will you blame now if there is no God because there is still suffering? People always say, “If God exists, why is there so much evil or suffering?” How about this, “If God doesn’t exist why is there so much beauty in the world?” These are just little sayings that one side or another holds onto. One thing I want to do is get past the little sayings and really get what God is communicating to us and seek out the truth. A large amount of our suffering stems from ourselves. We love to shift the blame. People say they are so angry at God. Someone said they were so mad at God for getting pregnant out of wedlock. You cannot be angry at God for that, you can be angry that God gave you the ability to choose and you chose poorly but you can’t be mad at God for the bad decisions you make. At some point we have to stop shifting the blame to God and we need to look in the mirror and say maybe I had a part to play in this. We don’t like to do that, we are great blame shifters. You probably think, I am never going to Mark for counseling, and I am not a good counselor, I am a truth teller. Having your hope based in something that is not true is not compassion. You need to let people see that they need to be angry at themselves and God can forgive them for their sins.
God told Cain and Abel to bring the first fruits of what they collected or what they harvested. God said they could show Him their thankfulness through this. Abel does this and brings his first and his best but Cain doesn’t bring his best and God doesn’t accept it. My son got $6 for his allowance this week and we were telling him he could give his first fruits to God as a thank you. He said, “I will give him a penny.” We were like no that is not your first and your best. Finally, when he got up to five cents I was like God doesn’t want your money, he doesn’t need your money and if you can’t give the full tithe and be happy about it, don’t bother, keep it all yourself and see if God blesses it. After talking to him, he finally decided to give his first and best fruits. I pray that our example will lead them to follow Christ; I am not going to force them. Cain didn’t do this and he got mad that God didn’t bless him or accept his offering.
Suffering has different sources:
Source #1: Ourselves
Genesis 4:6-7 “Why are you so angry?” the Lord asked Cain. “Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master.”
We start going down this path where we do something wrong and we shift the blame to God or others and God says to beware the path you are going down because it is going to end badly. Ultimately Cain kills Abel because he didn’t do right. One of the beautiful things God says to Cain is that your brother’s blood cries out from the ground. We can’t bury our anger, we can’t hide it and we can’t shift the blame because it cries out because no matter what we do, it permeates through and infiltrates our lives.
Also, a lot of times we think that God causes us this pain, more times than not, God doesn’t cause us the pain but we cause God the pain. We cause pain many times and we need to take ownership.
Source #2: Newton’s Third Law: law of reciprocal actions
Romans 8:22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us.
The second source is Newton’s third law, the law of reciprocal reactions. For every action force, there is an equal and opposite force. Scripture has been telling us this long before Newton that when we act, there is a reaction, even if we can’t see it.
For every action force, there is an equal but opposite reaction force. That is a law that God set up and Newton recognized. God put us as stewards of this earth. There is a documentary out called Inconvenient Truth. A lot of people have been upset by it but I am not sure why because God said He was going to put us as stewards of the earth. If we are not good stewards, it is going to break down. The inconvenient truth is that every action force has an equal and opposite reaction force. In the micro, if we as parents are alcoholics, or if we as a husband beat our wives and our children see that, this is a scientific fact that this is a generational sin that gets passed on from generation to generation. You hear this phrase, “I am only hurting myself” but that is against the law, the universal law. It is impossible to only hurt yourself. I just got back from Guatemala and the hopelessness is overwhelming and a lot of this stems from people that think they are just hurting themselves. There is this ripple effect that goes on and on. We are in this time of global change and we are seeing huge storms and I am not a scientist but it seems to be reasonable to me that if we don’t take care of our planet then we have a direct effect on that and there are going to be storms that cause devastating damage. When we look at these things and people being hurt in storms and we see that wars are happening we should know that God is not the source of these things. God has given us the ability to choose and we have chosen poorly. There is enough food in this earth, in our country to feed everyone, no one has to go hungry we just chose not to. We have the technology to take better care of our planet we just choose not to. When we make these choices, we have to realize there are repercussions.
Source #3: God
Jonah 1:2 “Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh. Announce my judgment against it because I have seen how wicked its people are.”
Now the final source, and the hardest one, is that God does send suffering. He does send pain. He does it for different reasons, to discipline us, for punishment, or for preparation. I want to stop here and talk about the triteness. For some reason we feel we have to have an answer for every bad thing that happens to someone but Paul says that we walk by faith, not by sight. Maturity is not being able to identify what God is doing in all suffering. If someone loses a child through complications or a drunk driver hits someone, sometimes we tell people things and we think we are well intentioned and we think it sounds really mature and we say God has a plan and this is what I think it is. There is some pain that is so deep and we think we have to have the answer but God says you don’t have to see the answer, you just have to trust that He is in it. Maturity is not being able to see the answer and following Him anyway. Now that is true maturity. One thing that we as followers of Christ do is trivialize people’s real hurt and pain by giving them bumper sticker theology. We should just be honest and say I don’t know if God is the source of this and there is no way to see what the outcome of this is going to be. For us to start guessing is harmful to us and others and at this point and we just need to ask God to help us get through another day, another week, another month, another year until He chooses to reveal it to us. In this lifetime, we may never know. True spiritual giants are okay with that and trust in God to work through it anyway for His ultimate good. A lot of times when you only see something in an isolated act, it is hard to digest it and bring understanding to it. When I was seven, I saw that show Chips and my big brother was watching it and I walked in right when Paunch had a big pen and then had hacked off both ends and was pushing it into someone’s throat. I didn’t have any context so I just freaked out. It was the most grotesque thing I had seen and I was freaking out. I actually saw that later on and I found out that somehow the person couldn’t breathe and the hero Paunch was saving his life. So many times we see things in an isolated context and we are convinced it is something that it is not. We are part of a story that is larger than ourselves. Things that happen to us and how we respond to those things will have a ripple effect from generation to generation.
I am just gonna fast forward here. There is so much more but really the question is does God care.
When Jesus saw their pain, He felt it so real that He wept. There is good evidence in the Bible that we can say when Adam and Eve brought sin into the world, Jesus wept. When Cain killed his brother, Jesus wept. When Israel disobeyed God again and again, Jesus wept. When Katrina struck the gulf coast, Jesus wept. When cancer took the life of a young person, Jesus wept. When you lost your child due to complications, Jesus wept. When your marriage came unraveled and ended in divorce, Jesus wept. When you got sick or you lost something or your body stopped functioning, Jesus wept. Jesus feels our pain and God does care about us. There is no short answer and there is no answer sometimes other than God has a bigger thing in store than we can see right now. Jesus when He walked this planet was aware of the brokenness that we all were experiencing and it broke His heart and He wept. That’s why He said that He was preparing a place for us where there was going to be no more weeping, no more hurt, no more sorrow.
Revelation 21:4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”
God does care. God cares about our suffering and our hurt and our pain. He cares about you. We need to follow this loving God. And we have to trust that everything that happens to those of us that are followers of Him will somehow in this generation or the next work together for good. That is the sign of maturity.
Let’s pray:
Dear God, I just pray for those in this very community who I know have experienced more pain than I have ever known. God I just pray in this moment that they can find it in their hearts, if they’ve been hurt by other Christians giving them trite answers, to forgive them. Many times we as Christians don’t know what to say and we just say things that we think sound good but they are so damaging. I pray for those that have experienced and are going to experience things that are devastating and if they are the source of it that they can ask for forgiveness. I pray that we can take responsibility and understand that you have given us stewardship over this world and it is through our poor stewardship that there is pollution and wars and those things affect people in real ways. The toughest one is when you send adversity our way. God, it hurts so badly but we know that many times that we will not change unless we experience pain. We know that just like physically, even though it hurts, it tells us that something is wrong. We know that we need a doctor and Lord you are the great physician. Finally, God, I just pray that we will realize that our pain is the source of other’s healing and we can release that pain, that hurt, and that sorrow and give it to you because you died on the cross to take it. We will be a vessel through which you bring healing throughout the earth. We love you Lord in Jesus Name, Amen.
