2022-10-04 Is God Fair

The speaker discusses the question of how a good God allows bad things to happen. They use the example of a prophet named Habakkuk who questioned God about the violence and injustice he witnessed. The speaker argues that if God interferes every time something bad happens, he would have to limit everyone's free will. They also discuss the idea that all people have done wrong and that a good God would have a perfect standard of goodness. The speaker suggests that Jesus' sacrifice offers a solution, allowing people to choose goodness and have a new core nature. They encourage listeners to keep seeking answers and not to fear questions. The speaker concludes with a prayer for those in attendance. I just wanted to take a second for anyone who wasn't necessarily aware, in that last song there, when they're using that phrase, Jaira, you might have ascertained from the context that we're talking about God—we didn't just switch religions partway through the service or something—the name Jaira is not just generically just God, right? When I was a kid, there was another worship song that was very popular where they said Jehovah Jaira, our provider, his grace is sufficient for me. And I was really confused because the only time I'd ever heard the word Jehovah before that was for Jehovah's Witnesses, so I was just like, my whole church just changed to Jehovah's Witnesses. What happened? And, you know, my parents explained it to me and all that, but Jaira is specifically talking about God as our provider, as the one who's looking out for us, and we're saying, Jaira, you are more than enough, is that his provision is all that we need. I just wanted to take a moment to mention that rather than glossing over it. I'm going to be trying to tackle a big question tonight, and that is the question of how a good God allows bad things to happen. It's a big question. So we're going to start by reading some scripture, and we're going to be reading from Habakkuk. You might not have heard of Habakkuk before, because Habakkuk is one of the, what's called, minor prophets. Not because he was unimportant or less important than the other prophets, it's just his book was shorter in the Bible, so that's why he's called minor. So here we are in chapter 1, verse 2. How long, O Lord, must I call for help? But you do not listen. Violence is everywhere, I cry, but you do not save. Must I forever see these evil deeds? Why must I watch all this misery? Wherever I look, I see destruction and violence. I'm surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. The law has become paralyzed, and there's no justice in the courts. The wicked far outnumber the righteous, so that justice has become perverted. So in this passage we're reading, as I said, the words of a prophet named Habakkuk. So his job as a prophet of God was to deliver God's word to the people, and oftentimes he also would observe just how much the people were not listening to those words, and the effects that that had on the world around them and their society and their culture. And here Habakkuk complains to God about everything that he sees, and he sees a few things. He sees violence, he sees injustice, he sees wrongdoing, conflict, people who are doing right not succeeding in life, and people who are doing wrong succeeding just bountifully and doing just fine. And I don't think that we have to look very far to see evidences of these same things in our world, or even playing out in our own lives. There's justice being thwarted all around us. There's corrupt governments around the world attacking innocent people. You know, we don't have to look far to see these bad things. And maybe, like Habakkuk, we're wondering the same thing. If God is so good, why are bad things happening? What I'm hoping to show tonight is that that might not be the right question. It might even be that God can't entirely be good if he is stopping every bad thing here now. I'm trying to be very careful with my wording here when I say, stopping every bad thing now. And you'll see why as we go. But my first point for this is how intervention can limit free will. And that's just simple logic, right? If you stop your kid from sticking a fork in the electrical socket, you've limited their free will in some way. You helped them, but you have limited their free will, right? So for our big question here, we're going to assume for the basis of this question that you and I both believe there is a God, an intelligent designer, who made the world and everything in it, including you and I. And, you know, that's what I believe. But for the sake of argument, we're just going to say we're all on the same page here. So how can he be a good God when he's letting these bad things happen? So here's one way to look at it. You know, they say there's two things you should never talk about in polite company, and that's religion and politics. We're going to do both for a moment. But before you get worried, I don't care who you vote for. In fact, I'd rather not know. Or even if you don't vote, doesn't matter to me. I'm not going to tell you who I do. This is an analogy with politics, but it doesn't apply to any party. It's not partisan. You're all welcome here, no matter what way you swing in your politics. But I want to draw an analogy for this for a minute. There's a lot of discourse when people talk about government and they talk about freedom. There's a lot of times that people, there's a lot of discourse around it where people will ask this question that I would argue is quite opposite to the one we're asking about God. You know, let's say, if the government's so good, why does it interfere with my personal freedom and choice? And we might not phrase it that kind of way, but we often might feel like certain laws are restricting how we live our lives, right? And we wonder why that's necessary. Or maybe we don't necessarily see it that way, but we see corrupt governments, you know, in other places or dictatorships that are not allowing the freedom of their citizens. And we're like, they can't be a good government because they're not allowing that freedom. And the funny thing is that, like, that makes perfect sense to most of us, but those are two opposite conflicting logic sets to those two questions. On one hand, we're asking, how can those corrupt governments, how can those governments be good when they interfere in the lives of people? But on the other hand, we're asking, how can God be good if he doesn't interfere? We're saying that any infringement that others make on our freedom is wrong. And yet, when we ask, how can a good God allow bad things? I don't think that we're seeing that the implication of that question is that we're assuming that a good God would override personal freedom to impose his will on others. And I think that if he did that, our question would change to, how can a good God control everyone and not allow freedom? Or how is a controlling God a good God? And what he does for one, he must do for all, because he's not a God of favoritism. We see in Romans 2.11, for God does not show favoritism. Which brings me to my second point. If we limit the free will of those who do wrong, that limits all of us. If God intervenes when any bad thing happens, he's going to intervene when you and I do bad things. Because I think that, you know, there's questions around, you know, what people would, I would say, mislabel oftentimes as acts of God in nature, tornadoes, all these kinds of things. There's those kinds of questions. But I think that you and I could probably agree that the biggest source of evil and wrongdoing that we've seen in history comes from people, right? We might not see ourselves as those people, but it comes from people, right? So at this point, we may be objecting, we might be thinking, okay, now he doesn't need to override the freedom of everybody, right? He just needs to override evil people. But if he overrides the freedom of evil people, he'd have to override freedom for all of us, because Romans 3.23 says that for everyone has sinned. We all fall short of God's glorious standard. All of us are evil without God to direct us. And I think, you know, that's a hard pill to swallow, because the word evil, I mean, we're just, we're thinking of Hitler right now, we're thinking of like some cartoonish villain in a movie somewhere when we hear evil, right? It feels so extreme. And I honestly believe that this is probably the hardest pill to swallow about Christianity, especially for our Western culture, I would say. There's this strong humanist viewpoint of our culture that says, deep down, we're all basically good. But the Bible tells us, and frankly, I would say that human lived experience tells us that that's simply not true. We've all fallen short of God's glorious standard. And, you know, even if we don't believe that about ourselves, you know, we'd have to be willfully ignorant to say there's a single person on earth who has never done something wrong. Even if it's the most innocent white lie, or incidental gossip, we've all done wrong things, right? So, we might be objecting, well, no, a good God doesn't need to intervene with everyone He doesn't need to stop minor mistakes and wrongdoing, just the evil above a certain threshold. Okay? So, what's the threshold? That's what we need to ask ourselves, logically. Where do we draw the line? Do we draw the line at people who break the law? Okay, that we could do that, but has anybody here never driven a kilometer above the speed limit? Has any of you? Oh, I knew you were okay, Les, yeah. You know, forgotten to use the turn signal, anything like that, right? I think, you know, and the other part of it is, whose law? If we're saying it's lawbreakers, whose law? Because our law here in Canada is different than the law in the U.S., it's different than the law in Taiwan, and even regionally within Canada. Did you know that, it was funny, I was on the phone with my family back in Ontario the other day, and I had made some, I don't know how it came up in conversation, but somehow it came up in conversation that I, you know, I've always got my water bottle with me, right? And I have it with me in the car, too, and my mom reminded me that in Ontario, that's illegal. Not to bring my water bottle with me, but drinking and driving doesn't just mean alcohol there. You can't drink this while driving in Ontario, that is a traffic infraction. You can't eat anything in your car, that is a traffic offense. So it's a different threshold, right? So who decides the threshold of what is bad enough that God needs to intervene? Well, if in our original question we're saying, if a good God, then we're assuming God is good, right? So it has to be His threshold, it has to be His laws we're talking about. So He would have to decide that threshold, and a pure, good God would have a perfect standard of goodness, and He would define it, because He is good, so anything inside His will would be good, but anything outside it would be bad. And that means if a good God interferes when bad things happen, as we're assuming in our original question, He would have to interfere every time anyone does anything bad. Anytime we do anything outside of His will, which means we'd lose all free will and freedom of choice. So that brings me to my last point here, is our God is good because He took the penalty for our wrongdoing. So what's our solution here? If God allows, it seems that if God allows bad things to happen, He appears to be a bad God, but if He interferes with our free will, He appears to be a bad God. It seems like it's a no-win situation, right? We're saying, we want to, we want to, I want to believe in God, but I couldn't believe in Him because bad things happened, but if He stopped all of that, then we would be saying, well, I want to believe in God, but what if there's another solution? A solution where God doesn't need to override our freedom or control us, and it could stop desiring to do evil. Enter Jesus, God coming in the form of a human to say, okay, human's messed up, I'll take the punishment that justice demands for evil actions. So He dies on the cross to take that penalty, but He's God, He can't stay dead, so He rises again to give us an option of a new life in Him, free from sin. So now, a good God has made the option for us to have a new core nature, right? No longer one of evil, but of good, by placing the one whose goodness Himself inside of us by accepting Jesus, by allowing His Holy Spirit to guide us to what is right, by His goodness within us compelling us towards good things, right? It's not our goodness, but it's placing goodness Himself in us, right? That's not to say we're not still going to make mistakes, right? I've never met a Christian who hasn't made mistakes before. I've made lots of them. I will continue to make lots of them. I'm going to continue to try and be better and better. I'm not saying that it's a goal or something, but we make mistakes. But we'll have a change of desire toward good through God's grace, and one day we'll be able to enter heaven where there is no evil anymore. But this happens by Him giving us choice, maintaining our freedom, without Him having to interfere or force goodness on us all, but by allowing us to fall in love with goodness Himself, by Him making the first move and showing us how good He is by dying for us. So why does a good God not always interfere when bad things happen? Well, I believe it's because He wouldn't be. He wouldn't be a good God if He took away the option to choose Him. And I think that it comes back to the fact that God doesn't want robots, right? He wants an actual relationship, you know? I joked earlier when I was explaining the word gyra, right? I explained earlier, I was joking earlier saying we didn't just switch religions. But the thing is, while that word has some religion, has some usefulness, Christianity at its core is not a religion. It's a relationship. And I think, ironically, oftentimes when we think of it as a religion, that's usually where things kind of go off course, when it becomes a system of rules rather than a relationship with this God, this good God Himself. So tonight, maybe you previously had a barrier to belief in God because you couldn't see how God could be good. And maybe as I was speaking, the Holy Spirit prompted you and changed something in your heart and you're ready to trust in this good God we profess. And maybe you've already believed in God, but this question nagged you, or you didn't know how to answer it when others questioned your belief, or maybe you're still not sure. You're curious. And I encourage you to keep coming back, to keep asking questions. Don't fear the questions. If my answer didn't fully solve it for you, I'll just lay two things out for you. One, I'm not the smartest guy around. I guarantee I'm not the smartest person in this room, but there is a God who wants to give you answers. I think sometimes we get this idea in our head that He's just trying to be vague, you know. He wants to give us answers, so keep seeking those answers. Don't be afraid of those answers, even if it doesn't all make sense. But then the other side is that eventually there will come a point where we do accept things on faith. I think that sounds really ethereal to some people, but the thing is that we accept things on faith every day. The classic example is you guys are all sitting on the pews right now. You guys have faith that whoever built these pews made them strong enough for you to hold on. Maybe you guys did. I didn't see every single one of you when you came in, but I didn't see anybody checking the pews for the construction before they sat down on them, right? So you guys have faith in that. So eventually there does come that point of faith, but I want to encourage you, don't fear those questions. Keep asking those good questions. But yeah, it's just on my mind, it's on my heart right now, because I know a lot of people who have been in the church for a long time, and they're hearing something like this, and they're like, yes, that makes sense. And somebody else, maybe this is new for them, but others might be like, well, I've heard that. I guess that sounds good. And maybe it doesn't totally make sense, but they're afraid of asking the questions. You know what I'm saying? There's a big thing that I've met a lot of Christians who are really nervous about what's called a deconstruction movement right now. There's a lot of people who are looking at their faith, deconstructing it, and going, do I believe this? Do I believe that? Do I believe that? And putting it back together. There's a lot of people that are really afraid. I'm not afraid of it at all. I think it's a good thing. Because those people believe it for real now when they put it back together. You know? A lot of people with teenagers or, you know, university students, they get nervous too because they, you know, they've raised their kid up to a certain point, and now they're asking questions. Right? But now is when they're actually going to believe it. Now it's not dogma anymore. Now it's something that they're actually living and believing for themselves. Anyways, let's pray, guys. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are a good God, and I don't want to make light of the hardships in this life, the tragedies, that evil that we see around us, that we've experienced personally. I know that it is so hard, and this brief look at this question, Lord, will never fully answer all the questions that we have about the bad things that happen in this world. But Lord, we pray that as we come to know this good God, as we come to know you better, that we would somehow make this world a better place, that we would somehow share your goodness with others, that we would be able to invite people and say, come and see this amazing God that I have found. And Lord, for those that are still wondering, they still have questions, Lord, I pray that you would continue speaking with them, Lord, that they would be continually open to working out their questions with you, digging into your word and finding out what those answers are, Lord. So I just pray for each and every person in this room, Lord, the things that they're going through, whether I'm aware of those things or not, Lord, I just, you are aware of those things. You see each and every person here, and you care about them personally and individually, Lord. You know how many hairs they have on their head, Lord, or maybe how many they don't. Lord, you know them, all of us, that personally and intimately, and I pray, Lord, that as everyone goes home from here tonight and goes back to the rest of their life, Lord, that you would continually make your presence known to them, Lord, and that you would help them to be able to put aside whatever distractions make it hard for them to hear you, to understand you, Lord. We just thank you that you do go with us, Lord. I just pray for each and every person in Jesus' name, amen. God bless, and we'll see you next week.