The Illusion of Choice: Why Human Free Will Cannot Save

• The Problem of Evil and Suffering [00:07:38 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor identifies the reality of evil and suffering as the central 'reason not to believe' being addressed, noting it is a question for all worldviews, not just Christianity.
• Theological Attributes of God [00:09:38 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor outlines the apparent contradiction between God being all-powerful and thoroughly good versus the reality that bad things happen, citing Rabbi Harold Kushner and Elie Wiesel as examples of those who struggle with this dynamic.
• Free Will and Authentic Relationship [00:13:01 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor introduces the foundational Christian answer: God created humans with free will to allow for genuine, voluntary relationships, using the analogy of marriage to explain why forced love is meaningless.
• Free Will and Authentic Love [00:14:05 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor argues that God chose to give humans free will rather than programming them to love, because forced love is enslavement and meaningless; authentic relationship requires the freedom to choose.
• The Fall and Original Sin [00:15:43 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor discusses Adam and Eve's choice to disobey God, noting that their decision introduced sin and evil into the world, and that all humans have repeated this choice.
• The Problem of Evil and Human Responsibility [00:17:06 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor refutes the idea that God is responsible for evil, using examples of modern violence and historical atrocities (Columbine, Hitler) to argue that evil stems from human choice and rage, not external forces or God.
• The Nature of Love and Risk [00:25:24 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses C.S. Lewis quotes to explain that true love inherently involves risk and vulnerability; God allows suffering because He desires authentic relationship, which cannot exist without the possibility of rejection.
• Divine Restraint and Mercy [00:27:45 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor explains that God has not yet eliminated evil because He is patient, giving everyone space and time to repent, as He does not want anyone to be lost.
• Theodicy and Divine Patience [00:28:00 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor explains that God's delay in ending evil is an act of love and restraint, providing time for repentance rather than immediate judgment.
• God's Presence in Suffering [00:28:54 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor argues that God is present alongside sufferers, sharing in their pain, illustrated by the story of Corrie Ten Boom and the theology of the crucified God.
• Free Will and Redemption [00:31:05 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor connects Jesus' suffering to the restoration of free will, allowing humanity to choose God again with the offer of forgiveness.
• Eschatological Hope [00:31:49 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses an anecdote about a missionary to illustrate that Jesus' return will be marked by the end of all suffering ('Enough'), serving as the ultimate resolution to brokenness.

• Sermon Illustration [00:00:12 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor recounts a personal visit to the Dachau Concentration Camp, describing a specific man-made ditch used to carry away blood from executions, and the general horrors of the camp including gas chambers and medical experiments.
• Sermon Illustration [00:04:14 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor narrates a story from Elie Wiesel's 'Night' about the hanging of a young boy in a Nazi death camp, where the boy struggles for over half an hour, leading to the question 'Where is God now?' and Wiesel's conclusion that God is hanging on the gallows.
• Sermon Illustration [00:10:45 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor reads a blog post titled 'If I Was God' which lists numerous evils (war, hunger, disease, etc.) that would not exist if the author were God, illustrating the human desire for a world without suffering.
• Sermon Illustration [00:13:47 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses an analogy of his marriage to his wife Susan, explaining that if she had been kidnapped or forced to love him via a pill, the relationship would be enslavement or robotic, not authentic love.
• Sermon Illustration [00:14:05 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses an analogy of a hypothetical scenario where he kidnaps a woman or gives her a pill to force love, explaining that such a relationship would be enslavement and meaningless, unlike the real relationship God desires.
• Sermon Illustration [00:15:43 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor recounts the biblical story of Adam and Eve choosing to disobey God, leading to the 'fall' and the introduction of sin and evil into creation.
• Sermon Illustration [00:20:10 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor cites Will Durant's observation that in 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 years saw no war, illustrating the pervasive nature of human conflict.
• Sermon Illustration [00:21:27 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor details the Columbine shooting, noting that the shooters did not fit typical profiles (loners, bullied, etc.) but acted out of premeditated anger and hate, challenging societal explanations for evil.
• Sermon Illustration [00:23:01 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor references Ron Rosenbaum's book 'Explaining Hitler,' concluding that Hitler's atrocities were not caused by abstract forces or mental illness, but by his own conscious choice to do evil.
• Sermon Illustration [00:24:16 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor shares a personal anecdote about a taxi driver in Munich who took him to Dachau; the driver shared that his teacher told him they were responsible for the world wars, emphasizing human accountability over blaming God.
• Sermon Illustration [00:26:49 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor quotes C.S. Lewis regarding the vulnerability required for love, stating that avoiding all risk and entanglement leads to a 'casket' of selfishness, which is akin to hell.
• Sermon Illustration [00:29:24 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor recounts the story of Corrie Ten Boom, a Holocaust survivor who, despite decades of homelessness and suffering, affirmed that God was just as good to her in the Ravensbrück concentration camp as He was when she later received a luxury home in California.
• Sermon Illustration [00:31:49 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor shares an anecdote about a missionary who, when asked what Jesus would shout upon His return, concluded that Jesus would cry 'Enough,' signaling the end of all suffering, starvation, and death.

• Pastoral Charge [00:33:08 ▶️ 📄]
  > To pray and turn to God.

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_02]
[00:00:00] The world is full of reasons not to believe in God. But what if they don't tell the whole story? What if those questions deserve a second look? You might find that belief makes more sense than you expected.

[00:00:12] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:00:12] Well, welcome to MEX Online Campus. You know, one of the most chilling places that I have ever visited was the Dachau Concentration Camp just outside of Munich, Germany.
[00:00:25] It opened in March of 1933.
[00:00:30] It was the first of all the German concentration camps.
[00:00:33] Dachau started it all, and it was the only one that was kept open throughout the entire Nazi era.
[00:00:38] It became a model for every other concentration camp.
[00:00:42] Now, camps with names like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.
[00:00:48] Dachau did not close until liberated by American troops in April of 1945.
[00:00:54] So it had a 12-year nightmarish run on those grounds.
[00:01:02] By the end of that run, over 200,000 human beings from across Europe were robbed of their freedom, tortured, exploited, and for tens of thousands, eventually killed on its soil.
[00:01:16] I remember there was one part I went to that will always stay with me.
[00:01:19] It was kind of off the beaten path.
[00:01:20] It wasn't something they kind of direct.
[00:01:22] I mean, it was marked, but you had to kind of veer off path.
[00:01:25] I'm not even sure why I veered off path and saw it, but I did.
[00:01:28] I wandered over to this ditch, and I just saw this huge ditch.
[00:01:32] I was wondering, why is that there?
[00:01:33] And I went over to it, and there was a little placard hidden among the weeds there that said the ditch was a man-made ditch that was there to serve as a stream to carry away the
[00:01:45] blood from all the people who were shot in the head at its mouth.
[00:01:52] It's hard to explain the sheer horror and weight of it all unless you're just there.
[00:01:58] So let me take you there, beginning with the front entrance, an entrance that is just woven or has woven into the steel the German phrase that was put on the entrance of every concentration camp, Arbeit macht frei, work makes you free.
[00:02:16] You enter that door and it swings open to guard towers and a barbed wire perimeter in this vast area where prisoners would gather for roll call.
[00:02:28] Here were the barracks designed for 40 men, but they would force as many as 400 inside each one, though only designed for a tenth of that.
[00:02:41] Some were designed for medical experiments that just defy description in terms of horror.
[00:02:46] I won't even begin to describe them, though you can read about them.
[00:02:50] Here were the gas chambers, disguised as showers, built toward the end of the war to speed up the execution of the prisoners.
[00:02:57] But nothing can compare to what the liberators themselves found.
[00:03:03] Here is some rare color footage, just under a minute's worth, with commentary from one of the American liberators.
[00:03:11] I want you to be warned, this is not easy to watch.
[00:03:14] It's not gratuitous, but it is graphic.
[00:03:18] Take a look.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_02]
[00:03:18] At the Dachau concentration camp, what they saw and recorded would not soon be forgotten.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_01]
[00:03:40] Twenty-year-old young man with a sheltered life behind him.
[00:03:50] Terrible shock.
[00:03:52] How can one human being do this to another human being?
[00:03:58] Impossible to think of.
[00:04:00] How does one justify this mass murder?

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:04:14] Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel put the memory of the horrors of his experience to words in a book that was appropriately called Night.
[00:04:24] One of the nightmares he describes has to do with the hanging of a young boy who was suspected of sabotage in a Nazi death camp by the German Gestapo.
[00:04:33] They began by torturing the boy.
[00:04:36] When he wouldn't confess, they sentenced him to death with two other prisoners, leading all three in chains to the gallows.
[00:04:45] It was to be a public execution.
[00:04:47] They had had thousands of prisoners out, forced to watch.
[00:04:53] While the head of the camp read the verdict, all eyes were on the child.
[00:04:57] How could they not be?
[00:04:58] His face was pale.
[00:05:00] He was nervously biting his lips.
[00:05:02] He was no more than 12 years old.
[00:05:05] Wiesel writes that he had the face of a sad angel.
[00:05:10] The three victims mounted the chairs and their necks were placed within the nooses.
[00:05:15] The child said nothing.
[00:05:17] Suddenly someone just cried out in the midst of all of that.
[00:05:20] Where is God?
[00:05:22] Where is he?
[00:05:24] No one answered.
[00:05:26] The executioner then tipped the three chairs over so that the bodies fell, jerking to a stop at the end of the ropes.
[00:05:33] and though the crowd was large, not a sound was heard.
[00:05:38] The only movement was the setting of the sun on the horizon.
[00:05:41] The only noise was the sound of grown men weeping.
[00:05:46] The two adults died instantly.
[00:05:48] Their tongues hung swollen, tinged with blue.
[00:05:52] The weight of their bodies snapped their necks at once, but the boy, lighter, did not die at once.
[00:05:57] It held the little boy.
[00:05:59] He was still moving.
[00:06:01] For more than half an hour, he hung there.
[00:06:04] struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under their eyes.
[00:06:11] Unfeeling and insolent, the guards ordered the prisoners to march past the dead bodies along with the still struggling boy.
[00:06:21] As Wiesel passed, he said he couldn't help but look up into the boy's eyes.
[00:06:26] And when he did, behind him he heard the voice say again, Where is God now?
[00:06:32] And Wiesel said that the inner voice of his heart answered, Where is he? Here he is.
[00:06:41] He is hanging here on the gallows.
[00:06:46] For Wiesel, that ended any chance of relating to God.
[00:06:50] For him, any idea, any thought, any belief, any existence of God died that day.
[00:06:59] He's not alone.
[00:07:00] Many people have seen things and they've gone through things, experienced things.
[00:07:04] And when they did, for them, God died that day.
[00:07:07] And there's a reason.
[00:07:09] There's a reason.
[00:07:10] And the reason is that there seems no answer to the most spiritually persistent question, the one that is the most spiritually troubling, the one that cries out to be answered the most and the loudest.
[00:07:23] And if not answered, you'll never get any further in your spiritual journey.
[00:07:27] And that question is, why?
[00:07:31] Why?
[00:07:31] Today, we're in a series on some of the biggest reasons people have for not believing.
[00:07:38] And today we come to the existence, the reality of evil and suffering in our world.
[00:07:43] It's just so hard to understand.
[00:07:45] There doesn't seem to be any answer that could ever be enough to explain the dark house of the world.
[00:07:51] Why is there evil?
[00:07:53] Why is there pain and suffering?
[00:07:54] Why is this such a screwed up, broken place?
[00:07:58] And let's be clear, this isn't just a question for the Christian faith.
[00:08:02] This is a question for every world religion, every philosophy, every worldview, everyone who is contemplating human existence.
[00:08:10] I don't care where you stand right now in spiritual things.
[00:08:13] Wherever you are, whatever you explore, you're going to need to find an answer to this one.
[00:08:20] If you reject Christianity because of the existence of suffering in the world, then you need to reject every other philosophy, every worldview, every ideology, every religion, because the reality of suffering is not unique to Christianity to explain.
[00:08:35] I don't care if you're Buddhist, Mormon, Scientologist, Hindu, everyone has to face the question about why is this such a screwed up world?
[00:08:43] Christians, Muslims, Jews, all the major theistic world religions have to answer this one.
[00:08:49] You may say, well, okay, that's why, maybe I'll just become an atheist.
[00:08:54] Well, they got to answer it too.
[00:08:56] In fact, it's one of the biggest arguments against atheism Because atheists may not believe in God, but they believe usually in the inherent goodness of human beings and the inevitable upward progression of naturalistic evolution, which means that human beings should be becoming increasingly good and noble, peaceful and humane through the advances of education and politics and technology.
[00:09:19] So in theory, it should be a better world every day.
[00:09:23] Anybody want to defend that idea?
[00:09:26] But there is a reason it is often laid solely at the feet of Christians.
[00:09:31] The Bible teaches some things that are absolutely inescapable and true to the Christian faith.
[00:09:38] The Bible teaches that God is all-powerful.
[00:09:41] He's able to do anything he wants.
[00:09:44] Further, the Bible teaches that God is thoroughly good.
[00:09:47] He is not mean.
[00:09:48] He is not capricious.
[00:09:49] He is not vindictive.
[00:09:51] Yet, this is the third big one, bad things happen.
[00:09:54] There is suffering in the world.
[00:09:55] And for many people, those three dynamics just don't mix.
[00:10:01] If God is good and he is all-powerful, he shouldn't let bad things happen.
[00:10:05] Since they do happen, then God either isn't good or he isn't all-powerful.
[00:10:10] Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, embraced the idea that God cares, that he's good, but he's powerless to do anything about it.
[00:10:21] Elie Wiesel said of the God described by Kushner that if that's who God is, he should resign and let somebody more competent take his place, which is why he concluded that God may be all-powerful, but he isn't good.
[00:10:36] Whether or not good or whether or not all-powerful, they're not alone in having trouble with God over this.
[00:10:45] Listen to the words of this blog that I ran across once.
[00:10:49] It was simply titled, If I Was God.
[00:10:50] He said, if I was God, the following words and phrases would not exist.
[00:10:57] War, hunger, drugs, murder, disease, poverty, rape, poor, you know, fight, genocide, famine, jealousy, slavery, homeless, conflict, hate, natural disaster, greed, crime, oppression, victim, gun, third world, accident, weapon, atrocity, bomb, molestation, dictator, steal, mental illness, sorrow, kill, sadness, loneliness, death, anger, apology, old, need, evil, sick,
[00:11:44] cancer hell. He then writes, if I was God, human beings wouldn't have a need for anything.
[00:11:52] There would be no hunger or poverty. There would be plenty of everything to go around for everybody if I was God. Natural disasters would not occur. The universe would not be, you know, it would be
[00:12:03] a beautifully calm place. Earth would be free from earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions and any other natural occurrence that has a chance to kill humans, if I was God, things would be a lot
[00:12:16] different. Strike a chord. It does with a lot of people. So what is the Christian answer?
[00:12:27] Let's look into it. Let's look into it. And then here's my challenge to you. You compare it to any other answer you want. But my goal is that by the end of our time together, you'll hear the God of
[00:12:39] the Bible's response, and you see whether it alters your thinking at all. And it's really more of a story than it is a textbook, sterile answer, a deeply relational story. So let me see if I can tell it. And to tell a story, obviously, you have to begin at the beginning. So let's go
[00:13:01] back, way back. One of the most foundational truths that the Bible teaches that is, in the beginning, God made us and that he made us for a reason. He made us be free-thinking, independent, fully alive creatures who could be in a relationship with him and then be in a relationship
[00:13:17] with other people. Because of this relational dynamic and desire woven into the very fabric of our creation, God gave us the freedom to choose and make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. And that included how we related to him or even if we
[00:13:36] wanted to relate to him at all. Because the basis of a true authentic relationship is that it is entered into of our own free will. Think about a marriage. The relationship I have with my wife,
[00:13:47] Susan, is meaningful and real because we both entered into it by choice. If she had been kidnapped and forced to live with me as my wife, that would not be a loving relationship. That would be enslavement. Even if I could have somehow, I don't know, given her a pill that
[00:14:05] would have created feelings in her for me. It wouldn't be real and I would know it. She'd be more like a programmed robot. God wanted us to be real and for our relationship with him and with
[00:14:20] each other to be real. He could have made us love him, but if he had, all of creation would have been reduced to meaninglessness, all the relationships meaningless. The only way the relationship God wants to have with us can have any significance at all is for it to be set free
[00:14:36] to either happen or not happen, you know, entered into or not, chosen or not. It's either a heart given or it's not. So that's exactly what he did. When God made us, he gave us free will, the freedom
[00:14:51] to choose. He made us beings who are fully alive and able to make personal, real-life decisions.
[00:14:58] Let me read from the Bible how the great leader of Israel, a man by the name of Joshua, talked about this for his own life.
[00:15:06] He said, If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.
[00:15:15] But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
[00:15:20] We all have that choice to choose what we want even when it comes to God himself.
[00:15:27] God in his sovereign will has willed that we would have that choice.
[00:15:32] Now, the very first use of free will, according to the story of the Bible, was, as you might expect, by the first thinking, soul-filled humans to walk the earth by the name of Adam and Eve.
[00:15:43] And the Bible is very candid about their choice.
[00:15:45] They made the conscious, purposeful decision to disobey God and organize and operate their life independent from his leadership.
[00:15:52] And the impact of their choice rocked all of creation.
[00:15:54] which shouldn't surprise us. God gave us the freedom to make our choices matter. So that meant that our choice is going to be real and with real consequences for good or bad. And no choice
[00:16:08] carries more weight or impacts a life or a world with more significance than the choices surrounding a relationship with God. The decision that the first humans made to reject God's leadership, to reject a sustained relationship with him, radically altered everything, including God's
[00:16:26] original design for how the world would operate and how life would be lived.
[00:16:31] We could have had life in intimacy with God, living in a world under his leadership and his direction and his protection, or we could have a life in separation from God, living in a world outside of his leadership and outside of his direction and protection.
[00:16:47] we could have had plan A or plan B, and we chose plan B.
[00:16:53] And when we did that, it ushered sin and evil onto the stage, as well as all of the consequences of sin and evil, almost like the unleashing of a disease that spread from human to human.
[00:17:06] Now, you could say, whoa, that's not fair.
[00:17:10] That wasn't me in the Garden of Eden.
[00:17:13] I did not make that decision.
[00:17:15] I don't want to be subject to that decision.
[00:17:16] Why are they representative for all of us?
[00:17:19] Why is their decision affecting me?
[00:17:20] I wouldn't have made that choice.
[00:17:24] Well, let's remember what we had going for us in Adam and Eve.
[00:17:28] You had perfect human beings, a perfect man and a perfect woman in a perfect sin-free environment, in a perfect relationship with God, and they screwed up.
[00:17:38] And you think that as an imperfect person with your life and your spiritual background and record, you could have done better?
[00:17:45] friend. I think for both of us, that was our best shot. But it really doesn't matter because we have both made our choice, just like they did. Every single one of us has made the same
[00:18:00] choice over and over again that Adam and Eve made. Every single one of us has chosen to go against God. I have. I have. And when we choose against God, all hell breaks loose. Literally. Theologians
[00:18:16] have termed this the fall and that we now live in a fallen world, which simply means that we live in a world that has fallen from its original design, a world that is not the way God intended
[00:18:26] it to be. We live on a planet that is suffering from the choices that we have made. Choices that, yes, began with Adam and Eve, but that we continue to make to this day. Choices that keep the world
[00:18:38] broken. The Bible says that because of the reality of our free will and how we have used it to turn away from God, there is pain, there is suffering, there is evil, there is wrongdoing. This is how
[00:18:50] it's talked about in the Bible. It says, this is the crisis we're in. God's light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Even creation itself is sick through the impact
[00:19:10] of sin on the world as a created entity that was never designed to operate as a fallen world.
[00:19:16] In fact, in the Bible, we're told that the whole creation has been groaning, which is why we have earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanoes and mudslides and wildfires and birth defects and famine and AIDS, which brings to the surface something that is not often talked
[00:19:35] about, that God is not behind what is tragic with this world, much less responsible for it. We are.
[00:19:47] As G.K. Chesterton once wrote in an answer to the question, what's wrong with the world?
[00:19:52] He gave a two-word response. He said, I am. God let us choose and we did, and our choices have brought continual pain and heartache and destruction. Our self-destruction and our bent toward that has seemed to know no bounds. I remember reading something many years ago that
[00:20:10] Will Durant once observed. He said, in the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. This is so important to understand. We race to blame God. And instead of looking in
[00:20:30] mirror at ourselves. We think the problem of evil and suffering is somehow out there, inflicted on us instead of right here flowing out of us. You know, this week the news was filled with stories
[00:20:44] that I wonder if it hardly even registers with us anymore. A man went on a rampage in Louisiana killing eight children, several of them his own. Another man in Mexico killed a Canadian tourist and injured 13 others at a major tourist attraction.
[00:21:00] What is behind that?
[00:21:03] I mean, we can talk about mental illness for some events.
[00:21:05] We can have honest and robust conversations and debates about gun control.
[00:21:10] But I was reminded how, when a recent anniversary of the Columbine killings took place, how we were able to look back with new insights into that event on that April morning in 1999 that forever changed our national consciousness.
[00:21:27] We learned that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not goths.
[00:21:33] They weren't loners.
[00:21:35] They weren't in the trench coat mafia.
[00:21:38] They were not disaffected video gamers.
[00:21:41] They hadn't been bullied.
[00:21:44] The supposed enemies on their list had already graduated a year earlier.
[00:21:48] They weren't on antidepressant medication.
[00:21:50] They didn't target jocks, blacks, or Christians.
[00:21:53] They just wanted to kill.
[00:21:57] Two seemingly normal, well-scrubbed high school boys went to their school in a prosperous suburban subdivision with the goal to kill thousands.
[00:22:07] When their bombs didn't work, they proceeded to kill 13 classmates and wound another 24 with guns.
[00:22:12] A few years after that tragedy, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Education Department compiled a study on school shooters and found that no single profile fit them all.
[00:22:25] What was clear was that very few simply snapped at the time of the attack.
[00:22:32] They'd usually planned it all out in meticulous detail.
[00:22:35] What was the conclusion?
[00:22:37] These were shootings of anger and rage and hate.
[00:22:41] And that it had always been there.
[00:22:43] And that rage has always been there.
[00:22:45] That hate.
[00:22:47] And it continues to this day.
[00:22:49] Why?
[00:22:51] Is it the loss of the American dream?
[00:22:53] Is it economic hardship?
[00:22:55] Is it ideological divisions?
[00:22:57] Is it too much time spent online?
[00:23:01] In his book, Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum surveys theory after theory regarding the Nazi leader's atrocities.
[00:23:11] In the end, all of his explanations, all of them, fail to explain the laughing Hitler, the bloodthirsty dictator who was fully conscious of his malignancy.
[00:23:27] He didn't have to kill the Jews. He wasn't compelled by abstract forces. In truth, he chose to. He wanted to. Here was simply an evil man doing evil things. And that is the answer. Evil.
[00:23:47] Evil. But this is precisely the word we seem unable to get out of our mouth, to own, particularly even talking about his presence in our own lives. We want to point the finger at God,
[00:24:00] that somehow it's all his doing or not doing, but it's actually about us, our actions, our choices.
[00:24:05] You know, I remember when Susan and I went to Dachau, we took a taxi from our hotel in Munich, and we told our German driver where we wanted to go. I knew a little bit of German from grad
[00:24:16] school, but it was pretty bad. Fortunately, he spoke some broken English. And I remember we told him where he wanted to go. He didn't say anything for a long time. He just drove. I mean,
[00:24:25] He nodded, understood where we wanted to go, but then he didn't say anything the whole drive.
[00:24:29] And then out of the blue, it's like he'd been thinking about what to say.
[00:24:33] He just said in this really thick German accent, he said, where you go, it is a very painful place.
[00:24:41] And then he paused again and he said, when I was 10 or 11 years old, my teacher took me there.
[00:24:49] She said, we were responsible for two world wars.
[00:24:54] now we are responsible for freedom. Then he paused again and he said, those were the right words to say. I think, I think so too, because it owned what happened as something that had nothing to
[00:25:13] do with God, everything to do with us. Now, some would say, well, if he knew how it was going to turn out, he should have never created us. He should, because everything from cancer to
[00:25:24] to concentration camps. It's just not worth it. Can I push back on that? When someone says something like that, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but I can't help but say that it shows how little they seem to know about true love. Because this is a love story.
[00:25:44] Yes, God took a risk. Yes, the choice he gave each of us has resulted in pain and in heartache and even tragedy. Yes, it would be tempting to say that it would have been easier on everyone,
[00:25:57] including God, never to have endured it.
[00:25:59] But that's not the way love, real love at least, works.
[00:26:03] When one loves, there's always risk.
[00:26:06] There's always risk, risk of suffering, risk of loss, risk of rejection.
[00:26:10] But without this willingness to be wounded on the deepest of levels, there cannot be authentic relationship on the deepest of levels.
[00:26:19] And this is God's great longing to love us, to commune with us for eternity.
[00:26:25] C.S. Lewis once wrote that if you try to exclude the possibility of suffering, which the order of nature and the existence of free will involves, you will find that you have excluded life itself.
[00:26:38] God has refused to let the perils of authentic love prevent him from loving.
[00:26:47] Here's something else that Lewis adds about love.
[00:26:49] He said, to love at all is to be vulnerable.
[00:26:53] Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
[00:26:56] If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements.
[00:27:07] Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable irredeemable the only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all
[00:27:28] the dangers of love is hell which is why when people say well why doesn't God just end it all now step in and end it again they just don't get it meaning the love of God that will not let go
[00:27:45] or stop because if God wiped out all evil all wrongdoing eliminated every person who committed harm against another tonight, how many of us would see the dawn? I would not. You see, God could wipe
[00:28:00] out all evil, all suffering this very night, but he doesn't. And the reason he doesn't is because of his love for people like you and me. Because if at midnight tonight, God decreed that all evil
[00:28:11] would be stamped out in the universe, not one of us would be here at 1201. And God is wanting to of every person, every possible chance to turn to him. Here's how the Bible puts it. God isn't late
[00:28:25] with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the end because he doesn't want anyone lost. He's giving everyone space, time to change.
[00:28:43] So where is God between the now and the not yet? Where is he in the pain of our lives and the lives of those around us? Where is he in the midst of the pain of his screwed up fallen world?
[00:28:54] Well, first he is right by our side, caring, longing to hold us in his arms. He reaches out to every person by name in the midst of our fallenness. The Bible says, if your heart is
[00:29:05] broken, you'll find God right there. If you're kicked in the gut, he'll help you catch your breath. We so often get into trouble, still God is there every time. After being a prisoner in Ravensbrück, the infamous concentration camp in Nazi Germany for women. Corrie Ten Boom traveled
[00:29:24] throughout the world telling her story of suffering in the context of a faith in God.
[00:29:29] For 33 years following Ravensbrück, she never had a permanent home. When she was 85 years old, some friends provided her with a lovely little home in California. It was a luxury she never dream she would ever have. And one day as a friend was leaving her home, he turned to her and said,
[00:29:49] you know, Corey, hasn't God been good to you to give you this beautiful place? Without even a pause, she instantly and firmly replied, oh, but God was good when I was in Ravensbrück too.
[00:30:05] But being with us is not all that God has done. He's unveiled himself and invested himself in the process of healing the wounds that have come from our choice by entering into the suffering process
[00:30:17] with us in order to lift us out of it. God himself came in human form to planet earth in the person of Jesus, and he suffered. He knows about pain. He knows about rejection. He knows about hunger
[00:30:31] and injustice and cruelty because he has experienced it firsthand. We worship, as theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote, the crucified God. You ever thought about it that way? Jesus on the cross was God entering into the cruelty and reality of human suffering, experiencing it
[00:30:53] just like we do, in order to demonstrate that even when we used our free will to reject him, his love never ended. But this was not suffering for its own sake, but suffering so that we might
[00:31:05] use our free will and choose again, but that this time the choice would be the right one.
[00:31:14] He paid the price our evil deserved, offering forgiveness for our evil and said, let's try this again. The ultimate deliverance, the most significant healing, the most strategic rescue has come. Our greatest and most terrible affliction has been addressed. God has given us the greatest
[00:31:34] answer to our questions he has given us himself. And he's going to keep giving himself to anyone who will turn to him until the end of time itself. But that time will come. It will come.
[00:31:49] I read of a missionary who once was asked what Jesus will say when he returns to the earth.
[00:31:54] When he was asked that, he thought, well, that's kind of an odd question. I mean, then he remembered, oh, the Bible says that when Jesus returns, he'll return with a loud shout.
[00:32:05] The student wanted to know, what is he going to shout?
[00:32:09] And the missionary thought a moment, and then it just came to him, kind of just loud and clear.
[00:32:15] He said, I think he's going to shout, enough.
[00:32:20] Enough suffering, enough starvation, enough terror, enough death, enough indignity, enough lives trapped in hopelessness, enough sickness, enough disease at the end when he returns.
[00:32:35] Christ will shout.
[00:32:37] Enough. And that's the story, which raises the real question when it comes to a broken world.
[00:32:47] Will the pain and suffering drive you away from God, or will it drive you to God? The whole reason it's being allowed, and that enough has not been shouted yet, is because he's hoping for people
[00:33:01] just like you to turn to him. And like we say all the time around here, that's just one prayer away.
[00:33:08] So instead of closing us in a prayer myself, let me just leave that prayer with you along the closing song, a song that reminds us that whenever we come face to face with the brokenness
[00:33:21] of this world, there is an answer, there is a reason, there is a story, and it's nothing less than the reckless love of God.