Where Was God?

, this morning I went to Ask a A profound question. And that is where was God. where was God? When one of our brothers here at the church.

contracted cancer and died a few weeks ago. Where was God when Elizabeth, the daughter of our church member, Susan Meyers, was hit by a car in the vehicle that her mother was driving and died. Beautiful young girl died at, at such a young age. Where was God when our brother Brian Q sits down here in the wheelchair, was riding on his motorcycle in Norco many years ago and, ran into a wall and ended up in a wheelchair.

Where was God when some of you ladies took babies into various, aspects of the pregnancy, 1st month, 2nd month, 3rd month, and then lost the baby? Where was God when those of you that were looking forward to a healthy baby, I gave birth to babies that were less than healthy and had to deal with and struggle with the tragedy of knowing that you were going to have a child that may remain in your home for the rest of his or her life. These are difficult questions. They're also just questions about like disasters like we've seen recently in the Philippines or a few years ago in Japan.

Where was God? Why didn't God stop these things? And this is a profound question and problem for Christians. When apologists have been surveyed on what or apologists have done surveys on what is the biggest question that people have about Christianity.

One of the biggest questions is the problem of evil. How is it that a loving God Can Allow such evil if he is so great. And so what I want to do this morning is, is really just take some time to explain this problem. And then we're going to offer some cautions in responding to this problem.

then I'm going to present some inadequate, inadequate solutions to the problem, and then I'm going to fourthly and lastly, give you a Christian worldview response to what we call the problem of evil. There is no outline in your bulletin. I don't have much of a PowerPoint. I'm going off of my old fashioned notes here, so you can take notes on the back of a bulletin insert or what have you.

But let me first of all, just let's state the problem that has been stated for us by Christians and non-Christians alike. And the problem is this, is if we look at what the Bible says, it seems to be clear that God is good. Correct? God is good.

And if we look at what the Bible says, it seems that God is great. In fact, most Christians throughout the ages have argued that God is all powerful. Correct? And yet when we look at the world around us, we see that evil exists.

And so the question comes, why doesn't this good, great God stop all evil? This is a profound question. God is good. So he does not approve of evil.

Correct? We look at the 10 Commandments, and we see that God does not approve of murder. He does not approve of rape. He does not approve of covetousness.

He's not willing that any should perish. The Bible says, and yet people perish every day. And not just people dying of old, old age, people die for tragic causes, tragic reasons. There's a family in our church who just recently their neighbor's 3 year old was walking in the driveway, and the mom was backing out of a truck and didn't realize that the 3 year old was behind her and the dad called out and tried to tell the mom to stop and the mother ran over the 3 year old and the 3 year old died.

Where was God? Why didn't God stop that mother? Why wasn't the window down to where she could hear the father cry out? Where was God?

Was God not good? Did God want that child to die? Was God not powerful enough? Was he up in heaven wringing his hands saying, Oh, please stop.

Or maybe God is evil Himself. Either he's evil or he cannot stop these things. These are questions that we all must ask, and as Christians, we've asked them for ourselves. I'm sure at times, and we've run into people that ask these questions.

That's the statement of the problem. Secondly, I want to give some cautions in responding to this problem. Some cautions in responding to the problem of evil. And here's one caution.

I'll, I'll state it as a question. Is this a question being raised through the emotions of present suffering? Or this, is this just an intellectual problem that somebody is having? You see, we want to be careful not to too quickly just rush into an intellectual answer to a very profound problem.

It could be that the person is just crying out the same way that Jesus cried out on the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In that moment on the cross cries out, Why, O God, is this happening? And so surely if the perfect Son of God can ask questions profound as this, we can ask such questions as humans.

And so we should not Browbeat the question, if it's coming out of an emotional response. Surely this mother whose 3 year old just died underneath her own tires, we would not run up to her and give our philosophical answers to the problem of theodicy, right? She biblically has every reason to say why, where, where was God, why did this happen? And we as Christians, we ask the same thing.

We see David saying in Psalm 22, My God, my God, why have thou forsaken me? We see David saying, Where is God? Where are you? Why are you silent?

Why do I cry out and you do not answer? And so it is appropriate at times to ask this question, and it is appropriate at times to ask this question and, and to not really expect an answer right away, correct? We see this in the book of Job. and so we need to have caution and try to discern the situation.

Is this just a person dealing with the emotions of suffering that they are currently undergoing? And so we come, we provide comfort, and we pray, and, and we ask the Lord to guide us at the moment to give appropriate answers. And yet there are people even in the midst of their suffering, after we've wept with them and after we've prayed with them, that really want to know and answer the question, where was God? Why did he allow my daughter to die?

Why did he allow my children to be molested? A second caution that we need to raise is this. Is this a job? A job being posted with the assumption that only Christians need to apply.

In other words, is this a question that only Christians have to answer? Is it only a Christian that has the burden to answer the question, where was God? And I want to present to you this morning, and we'll develop this more in the rest of the message that Christians are not the only ones that have to answer this question. This is a question that has been asked for thousands of years.

This is a question that was being asked before Christ was born. It was being wrestled with by Jews. It was being wrestled with by Babylonians, by people of other different religions. Whatever the worldview, whatever the religion, everybody has to deal with this question of the problem with evil, problem of evil.

Augustine, before he even became a Christian, thought he had found the satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. It was one of the things he was dealing with in the Greco-Roman world when he went from false faith to false faith and finally came up with what he thought was the solution, that the reason that there's evil in the world is because God So far away, and he is just communicating to the world through emanations. This perfect oneness cannot touch evil flesh, but he deals with the world through these emanations from God, and we are evil and our flesh is evil, but God is holy, and, and the two do not touch.

That was Augustine's answer to the problem of evil before he even considered coming to know Christ.

And so this is not just a Christian answer. And so whatever our response may be as Christians, we have to be careful of just assuming the guilt and the burden of proof in this question. The problem of evil is a human question, not just a Christian question. And then a third caution.

is that we need to be careful about soundbite, simplistic answers. In our soundbite culture, it's very, it's difficult to answer a question like this when you're on Larry King Live. because this is a fairly complicated, I wouldn't just say fairly complicated, a very complicated question. When we ask the question of the problem of evil, we have to first of all define what evil are we talking about.

Are we talking about moral evil like people that people that do bad things to other people? We're talking about murders. Are we talking about rape? Are we talking about just bad things that people do, or are we talking about natural evil like tornadoes or what we would call in the insurance industry, my dad worked in the insurance industry, acts of God.

so are we talking about that type of evil? There's also related questions that all intertwined into this. We could talk about the providence of God. We could talk about the various aspects of the will of God.

We get into issues of free will. We get into issues of God's sovereignty. And so we need to be careful of just offering simplistic answers. Well, The reason, for example, the reason that there's evil in the world is because God has given everybody a free will, and he doesn't want them to be robots.

And so everybody has a free will and people go off and do evil. And therefore God's not to be blamed. I'm going to suggest as we move through this sermon is, while that sounds good on the surface, it's an overly simplistic answer because it throws the Bible under the bus. It doesn't take into account all of the data in Scripture.

While it is true that God has created people with a free will, it's not so simple that God has created humans with an absolute free will to do anything that they want to do at any given time, and God is totally apart from anything that happens bad in the universe. He has nothing to do with it. That simplistic answer is almost like, I don't know if I can't remember the name of this game, but do you guys remember a lot of the guys probably remember this, that little football game, that table football game where you'd set up all the little pieces and you plug it in and you flip the switch and, and the table just vibrates, right?

And all these little men just move around and they just move around on the tabletop.

And it's almost like the idea is, OK, God just sets the pieces up and then he flips the switch and he steps back and just watches it and then the pieces just move around and then they just bump into each other. I just remember playing that game. It'd be so frustrating because the guy that has the ball and you want him to move this way, he's always like going this way and starting to go backwards so you have to push him around and stuff like that. It's like when I hand the ball off to my son Samuel, who's 5 years old right now.

We're out there in the street. Give him the football, and he just inevitably just turns around and goes that way. So we don't allow any backward progress when we're playing football with Sam. so, so there's these oversimplistic answers that somehow God just sets up the human race, gives them an absolute free will, then he steps back.

I want to call this volitional deism. Volitional deism. Do you guys know what deism is? Deism is the idea that God just wound up the universe, and he let it go, and he stands back.

This is what Dia, like Benjamin Franklin and other people in Europe, different philosophers, they tried to argue for a concept that the natural world could run itself without God's intentional interference. So God just wound up the universe. You normally think of it in natural processes like planets and sun, the sun and the moon and just the way nature works. And while there is some truth to the fact that God does have laws that govern his universe, it's not so simple to say that God's just not interfering.

And when people try to argue that God's not interfering with the free will of man, they're basically just arguing for a volitional deism. God winds up the human being, sets him on the little vibration table, and then we just do what we want. Overly simplistic answer that ultimately throws the Bible under the bus. And so that brings us to our third point.

We've talked about the problem of evil, we've stated it, we've given some cautions. Now we want to, I want to lay out some inadequate solutions to the problem. And that bleeds into what I was just saying. There's, there's several solutions that people offer to the problem of evil.

Both from a Christian and non-Christian perspective. one of the inadequate solutions to the problem of evil is this. I want to call it the throw God under the bus solution. And evil, by the way, throw God under the bus solution.

The throw God under the bus solution is basically the solution that says, because we, the Christian worldview says that God is good, and says he's great, and we can still see evil in the world, therefore, God must not exist. So we throw God under the bus. There can't be a God that truly exists if God is good and God is great. British philosopher and atheist, Bertrand Russell says this, no one can believe in a God if they sat at the bedside of a child.

So this is throwing God under the bus, a dying child. So a child is dying of cancer. You sit next to their bed and you're trying to grapple with why this is happening. And according to Bertrand Russell, You cannot believe in such a God that would allow a little child to die like that.

What are we to say to this throw God under the bus argument? One of the things that we should ask Bertrand Russell and others is what would be the alternative solution according to you? According to an atheistic worldview that basically assumes that we all arose by chance, nothingness became something by some magical spark in the universe, and the Big Bang happened, and then chance after chance after chance we became human beings, and now you have a little girl dying in a bed.

My question would be, so what?

It's the product of chance. She's going to die and just go on into the elements of the universe. Survival of the fittest, baby. What's the big deal?

If he's operating according to his own worldview, there should be no problem with a weak child dying, right? But he betrays his own borrowing of the Christian worldview by raising the very question, by raising the question, how can I believe in God if a little child is dying? He is betraying something, and that is he believes that something is morally wrong here. Something is morally wrong.

And we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about how to respond to that here in just a second. It's how did he, how did he arise at this concept that there's anything, any such thing as morality or any universal truth, or any universal reason for believing in right and wrong? We look at the Bible, and we see in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and it was good, and it was good, and it was good. God creates goodness.

According to Bertrand Russell's worldview, goodness is a relative thing. It's just a risen. It's a product of chance in our minds. And we just decide this is good, and this is good.

Goodness and badness is really like whether you like spinach or not, right? I like spinach. My son doesn't like spinach. But it's just his opinion, right?

And there's there's no rhyme or reason as to why one person likes one or the other. And according to an atheistic worldview, whether a child dying in her bed is good or not, it really should not even matter whether murder is good or not, should not really even matter. In fact, someone like Joseph Stalin should be the poster boy of atheism. The poster boy of atheism is somebody who says survival of the fittest, it's all a product of chance.

The strong survive, the weak die. Let's evolve. And so a child that is dying in the bed is actually a proof of God, not an argument against God, a good God. In fact, this was the argument that brought CS Lewis to Christ.

CS Lewis as an atheist was asking the same question, How can a good God, who is also great, allow for evil. But then we consider the opposing possibilities. If there were no God, if there were no God, then there is no evil, and anything that happens is fine. And so the very fact that he has an understanding of evil that doesn't just come from himself.

There's a universal sense that all human beings know that there is evil, there is good. Therefore, there must be a lawgiver. And so that is the first inadequate solution throw God under the bus. Secondly, throw God's power under the bus.

We can throw God's power under the bus. We basically say that, God is good. But he's just not powerful enough to do anything about it. This is the answer of some Jewish apologists to explain the Holocaust, is that God is good, but he does not have all power to stop all things.

This is also why voodoo has taken the hearts of Haitians. Haitians believe that God is, is very good. They just don't believe that he's omnipresent, nor is he all powerful. However, demons are everywhere, and the likelihood that God would have any interest in being on Haiti at any one time is very unlikely.

So the way that you have to deal with the demons is through the witch doctor and through voodoo. God is good, but he's not all powerful. a third inadequate solution would be to throw God's goodness under the bus, which is similar to the first, that is God is all powerful, but he's just not good, or he does not care. And, and even we as Christians, this can be the temptation for us, especially when we fall into great tragedy.

Surely many of you have been there where something terrible happens in your life, and, or you're trying to minister to someone who is going through great tragedy. I've, I've found this myself. Trying to minister to someone who seems to be ready to come to Christ. And then some terrible tragedy happens in their life.

And then they turn away from the Lord. And I find myself asking, God, didn't you, didn't you want that person to get saved? They were, it seemed like they were right there. And then they went, they fell right back into alcoholism.

Why did you allow that? They were right there and then that sin grabbed them again. Why did you allow that, God? That's a temptation for all of us, and yet we need to cycle back around the way the psalmists do, and they ask the questions in early in the Psalms, and then they come back and say, nevertheless, we will praise God and give Him glory.

The 4th inadequate solution is we throw God's word under the bus. We throw God's word under the bus. The way this works is we take portions of God's word that help get God off the hook of the problem of evil. but in doing so, we sacrifice other parts of God's word.

This is what I did as a younger Christian with the with the issue of God sending people to hell. People come up to me as a Christian on my high school campus and say, how can a good God send people to hell? And this was my response to everybody. God doesn't send anybody to hell.

You're on a slide down to hell, and God is holding the rope, and if you'll just grab onto the rope, he'll pull you up. So ultimately it's your choice. If you grab that rope, he'll pull you up. If you don't, you'll go down to hell.

Well, that gets God off of the hook of the sending people to hell question and problem, problem that I have though when I was using that solution. I was throwing the Bible under the bus. The Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says that God created hell for the devil and his angels.

The Bible says that God is the one who will send people to hell. His angels will pick people up and throw them into the lake of fire. In Revelation chapter 20, God is the one that sustains all things in the universe. Right now hell exists because of the will of God.

He sustains it. And for all of eternity, God will sustain a place called the Lake of Fire, particularly for the punishment of the devil and his angels and all who follow the dark kingdom. And so it may seem to get God off of the hook for a moment, but anybody that's read the Bible very carefully would know that I'm throwing the Bible under the bus to protect God from the problem of evil. So we have to be careful about that.

And then a 5th inadequate solution would be this, we'll state it this way good and evil are necessary partners in crime. Good and evil are necessary partners in crime. This idea is what you get from Eastern philosophies. It's what you get from the New Age movement here in the West.

It basically says that you cannot have good without evil. We cannot even understand good without evil. We can't have light without darkness. You need to have both.

And so for us to really understand goodness, evil must exist. Therefore, evil is good because it serves the purpose of helping us identify the good. This is the yin yang philosophy. This is part of what you see in one of my, favorite.

the Star Wars series, the whole concept of the Force, the idea that there's good and bad aspects of the Force, and both are absolutely necessary for balance in the universe. Big problem is, is basically you make evil a good thing, and this is exactly what you see in many Eastern worldviews. It's, it's actually a good thing that evil exists. It's necessary.

If you don't have evil, then you don't have good. So these are what we would suggest are inadequate solutions. Let's move into the last. 10 minutes or so here into a Christian worldview response.

We've been peppering this all throughout these first few points, but number 4, a Christian worldview response to the problem of evil. I would suggest that first of all, we need to admit that this is a thorny problem for humanity, not just for Christians. This is a thorny problem for humanity, not just for Christians. We don't want to belittle the fact that this is a difficult issue.

That this is emotional for many people, that this is an issue that has been dealt with for hundreds, even thousands of years. And yet is a problem for everybody. And so when you're dialoguing, when I'm dialoguing with an unbeliever, I would ask them, one of the things I ask them first of all is, What do you do about the problem of evil without a God, without the Christian world? How do you handle it?

And so that really leads to our second point of a Christian worldview response, and that is what Greg Coco calls turning the tables. We admit that there is a problem. Number 2, we turn the tables by asking a few questions. Here's one of the questions you can ask.

What do you think God should do about evil? If you were God, How would you handle it? and let them defend their position. And there's an assumption by there's several questions as you dialogue with the average unbeliever in our society where they think that they've made their case and the gavel comes down as soon as they ask the question.

Where was God when Hitler killed 6 million Jews? Boom. Argument over They haven't made any argument whatsoever. All they've done is stated a question, a question that their worldview has to answer as well.

So ask the question, what do you think God should do about evil? What would you do if you were God? Another question that you can ask is what is evil. What do you consider to be moral?

And the average person's going to say, well, killing 6 million Jews, that's immoral. That's immoral. We should not, why does God allow children to be abused? Why is God allowing sex trafficking?

Why is God allowing this? Why is God allowing that? If they acknowledge that evil exists, the question that you can ask is, where did your concept of universal evil come from? Do you believe in universal evil?

Do you believe that there are universal rights and wrongs? And if the person has done any studying, if they've been down here to UCR for any time at all, they're going to start to backtrack as soon as you say, Do you believe in universals? Once you admit that you're into universals, then you realize that universals cannot emanate from one individual, correct? So as soon as I say, where did you get that moral from?

Where did you get the idea that murder is wrong? Once they say I don't believe in universals, then their morality just comes from themselves. If your morality comes from yourself, then it's merely a social construct, correct? Which means there is no real evil.

So then what's your problem? We're back to spinach. You like spinach. I don't.

Right? If they say that it's moral relativity, it's just arisen by chance like everything else according to evolutionary thought, then what's the problem? We're talking about survival of the fittest. And I want to To make that point, there's probably no person in the last century that has made this point better than Ted Bundy.

Raise your hand if who Ted Bundy is. OK, this is a mass murderer, right, that murdered over 30, more than 30 girls and women in the 1970s. before his death, he gave an interview and admitted even more than what he was convicted of, and, and many people think there's probably even countless other bodies that have never been found. But I want you to see the logical consistency of this man before he was executed.

He says, I learned that all moral judgments are value judgments, that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be right or wrong. I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value of judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these others.

Other human beings with human rights. Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog's life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more than one, more for one than the other?

Surely you would not in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as moral or good and others as immoral or bad. In any case, let me assure you, my dear lady who is doing the interview, that there's absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me and the most conscience, conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

Bundy has stated the atheistic worldview perfectly.

And if atheists are consistent with their worldview, they would not be asking why does a good God allow evil. They would all be doing evil to the full, because this world is ultimately totally by chance. There is no reason for anything that we do. Anything I or you do is neither moral nor good.

It's all moral. And in fact, the best thing that we can do is to allow the strong to survive. Adolf Hitler took this philos philosophy to the nth degree. He was severely influenced by an evolutionary viewpoint.

That's why he, he made his arguments against black people. He made severe arguments against the mentally disabled. In fact, he instituted the elimination of the mentally disabled in Germany because of the concept of survival of the fittest. Hitler should be a poster boy for atheism because he was practicing the worldview consistently.

And so a Christian worldview first comes and turns the tables and says, Where does evil come from in the first place? And then we begin to go to what does the Bible say? What does the Bible say? Let me, summarize some things, that we can discern from the Bible.

Genesis one, God is good, and he has created all things. Now, let me preface this, We, when we come to answer the problem of evil, as Christians, we acknowledge out the gate that there is such a problem in the universe. And that without revelation, without knowledge from God Almighty, there is no answer to the problem of evil. If God did not decide to reveal Himself through prophets, through Jesus Christ, and in His word, we would all be postmodern, we would all just give in to, to the atheistic worldview, we would all be hopeless, because we would have no answer.

There is no way that we can look at the stars, the sun, the moon, the order of the universe, and the chaos of the universe, and discern an adequate response to the problem of evil without gracious revelation from Almighty God. And so we do not apologize for going to the Bible to get information that we could get nowhere else. So Christian, do not be ashamed to go to the Bible for your worldview. Do not think that somehow you need to start outside of the authority of Scripture.

Somehow go to some philosopher or some historian or some scientist that bolsters the worldview or bolsters the Bible. Start with the Bible because it comes from Almighty God, and He is ultimately the one that can give us this answer. And so as we look at the Bible, we see that God created the world good. Genesis 1.

And God demonstrated, or God is great as is demonstrated by His creation in upholding all things. Genesis 1 again, Colossus 1. He upholds all things by the word of His power, and God has revealed to us in the Bible we would not know this otherwise if we didn't have Genesis 3. That we have the fall of human beings and then in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 we have the fall of spiritual beings.

We don't get a full explanation of why these beings fell, but we do know that they opposed God. which is the ultimate definition of evil is opposing God. We don't know why Adam and Eve opposed God. We don't know why Satan and the demons opposed God.

We just know, according to biblical revelation, they did. And so evil came into this world as as these beings opposed God. And yet God, as he looked upon this world, he determined that he would not allow evil to persist unchecked. He would judge evil, and he did judge evil right in the garden when he told Adam and Eve, You shall surely die.

Adam and Eve. didn't just die spiritually on that day. There was a process that began in their bodies, as God activated the process of death. Death is not just a natural process that has come about through evolutionary chances.

Death is something that was activated by God Almighty to limit the evils of sin. And so death itself is an answer to the problem of evil. Why do people die? Because God has chosen to limit the evils of sin.

In fact, God at first allowed human beings to live hundreds of years old. We see in the Bible, 78, 900 years old, and the, and the world grew so evil that he was doing and thinking evil continually. It says in the book of Genesis that God had to bring a flood and wipe everybody out except for 8, and then he began to even limit the age of human beings so he could further constrict evil. So he constricted it with death.

Then he limited the age and, and he hasn't allowed most people to live beyond 100 years old. Just imagine how much more evil can persist on the planet when people can connive evil for 900 years. Now the most evil people in the universe die by at least 100, and then they have to pass on that evil to their kids, and they've got to relearn the whole thing, born in it and learning it. That's a whole another sermon.

So you have, you have God bringing death on the earth, you have God restricting evil at the flood. That's part of our, our worldview question, Christian worldview, answer to the problem of evil. And, and yet, we see that God will ultimately destroy evil. At the end of the age, we have people dying on this earth.

But then at the end of the age, he will cast the devil and his demons into the lake of fire, and then he will cast all of the cowards and and those that have mocked God and those that have gone after the devil will be thrown into the lake of fire. So he will ultimately judge evil. And so in his greatness he is judging evil even now and in the future in His goodness and kindness, he's chosen to not judge immediately. God has chosen to allow people time to hear the good news of the gospel so that they might be saved, and God has been pleased to save hundreds of thousands of people throughout the course of history.

The real question that we should be asking is how in the world can a just God not wipe out rebellious creatures immediately? How does a just God allow us the goodness throughout our lifetimes? You realize that most people don't really think about the good things that God does for them. When I say most people, I'm talking about unbelievers.

They wake up in the morning and they feel good and they eat breakfast and they go play golf and they breathe the air and they look at the sky and they look at the beautiful mountains around us in the winter when we don't have smog, and they drink that in and their car runs most of the time. The laws of nature are working. And they have children and they enjoy babies and they enjoy puppies and, and all of these things are going on, and yet they're unthankful. And then suddenly they go to the doctor and they find out they have cancer and they say, why God, are you doing this to me?

It's almost like that old episode of Seinfeld with George Costanza. You guys, anybody ever heard of George Costanza? This guy goes in to see a psychologist because he's worried about some, something on his lip. He thinks he's got a problem.

He, he thinks he's going to die of something. And he just cries out to a psychologist. He says, I just knew God would not let me succeed. She says, but George, you don't believe in God.

I do for the bad stuff. And that's the, that's the attitude that many people have, is they believe in God when the bad stuff happens. But when the good stuff happens, we don't think of God. According to a Christian worldview, we look, and we see that God is also these last couple of points, God is using evil.

God doesn't just allow evil, but he uses it for his own purposes. God used Satan to buffet Job, correct? God will use in 2 Thessalonians, because people do not love the truth. 2 Thessalonians tells us that God will send, not just allow, God will send a strong delusion, so that they should believe the lie.

This is part of the complexity of the problem of evil is we know that God is good, God is great, and He cannot be blamed for evil. But yet in His greatness he can use evil for his own sovereign purposes. I can't understand that. If you can come tell me.

But God will send, now listen to this. He will send a strong delusion. What's a delusion? It's a lie.

He's going to send a strong delusion upon people who do not love the truth so that they would believe the lie so that they would not come to the truth. There's this mixture of their human responsibility with God's sovereignty. He's like, You want to lie? Here's a good one.

Believe it. 2 Thessalonians, let's end with this. This is the most profound answer to the problem of evil. Acts 2, chapter 2, verse 22 and 23.

And it's the cross itself. That Jesus Christ, if there was anybody, there's only one person who's ever walked this earth that did not deserve to die, that shouldn't have died, right? The wages of sin is what? Death.

Did Jesus ever sin? No. Should he have ever died? No.

Jesus should have never died. He should have lived forever and ever and ever as a human being because he never sinned. He wasn't under the curse, but he willingly, he was subjected to the curse by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And yet human beings had a part to play in the sovereignty of God in bringing this about.

Peter understands this in his sermon in chapter 2 of Acts. Look at verse 22. Men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, the man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know. Now pay attention to the wording here.

Him. That's Jesus being delivered up by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, who delivered Jesus up. God, the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God was delivered up. You have taken by lawless hands and have crucified and put to death, you murdered Jesus.

And God predetermined it. What? God predetermined his foreknowledge, his purpose. Was there any other possibility that Jesus would go to the cross and die on the cross for sins?

No. Was there any other possibility that Jesus would walk and be beaten by soldiers that he would have thorns put into his head that he would bleed and even suffer underneath the wrath of his father for us? Was there any other possibility? No, Jesus Christ cried out in the garden.

He says, If there's any way this cup can pass from me, let it pass. Did it pass? No. There was no other possibility in God's economy.

Jesus went to the cross, and He suffered underneath the wrath of Almighty God. He suffered underneath the sovereign plan of God. And yet human beings came and murdered Jesus. There are soldiers that were around the cross that if they did not repent, And call upon the name of Jesus died and went to hell for putting nails into the hands of Christ which God had ordained to happen.

That's the Christian worldview. We stand back and we just say, God, you are great. You are mighty, you are much bigger than us. You, you are incomprehensible that you can take human responsibility and humans who are responsible for their decisions, and yet you can control evil, you can use it for your own sovereign purposes.

This is not a simplistic response. But brothers and sisters, this is a biblical response. This is a biblical worldview. God is good.

God is great. And yet there is evil, and God has allowed it. And the one person who has suffered underneath that evil more than any other human being is Jesus Christ Himself. If you've suffered today, and you, you're asking yourself, where was God?

Where was God? In one sense, Jesus is right there with you, because when he was hanging on the cross, he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And so Jesus has asked that type of question. And so it's not wrong to ask the question.

We just pray that by the power of the Spirit and revelation you will not stay there, that whatever you've gone through, whether it's the loss of a baby, a disabled child, death, suffering in your own life, That you will look to Jesus and realize I can ask the question God is compassionate. He wants to hear the question, but he also wants to give an answer, and that is God is good. God is great. God has created a good universe, but we've opposed him.

And yet he can take our opposition and manipulate that for our good and for His glory. And we don't need to understand it all, but we know that when it's all said and done, when we're in heaven, that we will glorify God for His masterful plan, and we will glorify Him for His grace. And if you call upon the Lord Jesus Christ, if you don't know Him, if you call upon the Lord Jesus Christ, say, Lord, I don't know all the answers to all the problems. I don't even know half of what we're talking about this morning, but I know I'm a sinner and I need Jesus Christ.

I need Him to save me. If you would call upon him this morning, you can be saved from your sins, and you can go to heaven and you can escape the evil and the judgment that is coming and go into a place that will be absolutely amazing because one of the cool things about heaven. One of the really cool things about heaven that I love, I love. There's no possibility that I will ever be able to rebel against God again.

You want to talk about true will. I want to be in a place where I know that I can love God. And there's no possibility that I'm ever going to turn away from Him again. Now, if you want to say I don't have a free will, because I could never turn away from God in heaven, I'm glad that I can't turn away from Him in heaven.

I'll be glad to be in heaven to have that part of my will killed. That I will never be able to rebel against Jesus Christ ever again. I will love him. And that doesn't minimize my love for God at all.

The fact that I can't choose evil in heaven, does that minimize the love that I have for God and that He has for me? No way. I will be in heaven. He will love me.

I will love him. And for all of eternity, I'll never question whether he's going to turn away from me. And I'll never question whether I'm gonna turn away from him, because he will have me in his hands for all of eternity. That's the Christian worldview of the problem of evil.

And so as you guys deal with this for yourself, as you guys go out and engage people, I hope that the Lord will increase our understanding that we can be wise as serpents, as Jesus says, but harmless as doves, as we answer one of the most profound questions that people are asking out there, and that the Lord will use us to go out and bring the good news. Let's pray as we do so, let's have our ushers come forward. Lord, we thank you so much that you have revealed to us and given us hope in, in your word with these profound questions.

Without the Bible, we would be lost.

Without the Bible, we would be running around like everyone else, asking what is reality? What is truth? What is right? What is wrong?

There is no hope outside of your word. And we thank you that your Spirit has opened up your word to our hearts so that we can hear it and believe it. We pray for friends and family and people all around us who don't know you and don't know Christ. We pray for anybody that's with us this morning, who may not know you, who's dealing with their own sin or dealing with hurt.

We pray, Father, that You would move in their hearts, that they would know that there are answers that have been revealed to your Spirit in the Bible. We pray that you would prick their hearts, that they would come to know you. We pray that you receive these offerings, Lord, that we give. We ask for your blessing upon the San Bernardino Pregnancy Center.

We ask for your blessing upon our church. We thank you for your greatness and goodness and that you control all things, even evil, that you will judge. And have mercy in the end. In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.