Jack Sluter 8_11_24

The speaker asks everyone to take out their prayer books and turn to page 784. They explain that the psalm on that page is a prayer for deliverance from personal trouble. The speaker emphasizes the importance of being honest and open in our prayers to God, as God already knows everything. They mention that Jesus understands human suffering and that the issue of suffering in the world is a challenge for believers. The speaker discusses the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and believes that God allows natural disasters to happen because creation has the freedom to grow and make itself. They also mention that human evil exists because God gives humans the freedom to choose. The speaker concludes by saying that opposites cannot exist without each other and that this perspective may be the safest way to look at the world. Would you please take out your prayer books. They are in black books. And turn to page 784 in your prayer book. Page 784. There you will find the psalms that we just sang. This psalm is a prayer for deliverance from personal trouble. It is called in Christian language a lament. Its title is a preponderance. That is Latin for the first word of the psalm. Out of the depths. Verses 1 and 2 are a cry for help. Verses 3, 4, and 5 say that because it is God's nature to be merciful, the psalmist eagerly awaits his help. And then verses 6 and 7 say that Israel should take the same attitude in praying for her national difficulty. These words come from someone who is in great distress. The psalms teach us that when we pray to God, we must be honest and open. We can't have anything in our prayers to God because God already knows it and God is waiting to hear us say it. To put it in language. In the Christian use of the psalms, we are reminded that in Jesus Christ, God has come to know human suffering from the inside out. God is a fellow sufferer who understands us completely. After all he went through to humanity, we can trust that when we pray to him, Jesus will understand. Now the issue of suffering in the world is one of the great problems with which Christians have to wrestle. Everything from hurricanes to cancer. The world does not look at the first sight like the creation of a benevolent and almighty God. At least it doesn't to me and it doesn't to many other people I've known in my life. It doesn't look at first sight like the work of a benevolent God. I think this is the greatest difficulty which holds people back from religious beliefs. Those of us who are believers must not be unconscious of this great challenge that we face. Now consider this. In the year 1755, there was a great earthquake in the city of Lisbon, Portugal on All Saints Day. The churches across the city were filled with people and must have been collapsed in the earthquake. And 50,000 people died. 50,000 people died. What was God doing in the Lisbon earthquake? After a lifetime of trying to understand evil, I think the answer is that God was allowing the earth's crust to behave in accordance with its nature. Now think about that. That may seem hard. It may even seem callous. But I believe it is the truth. We believe that in creation, God has brought us into a world which God allows to be itself and to make itself. That is called evolution. A Christian belief, the gift of divine love from God to the world, has been to bestow this independence upon creation. God is neither a timer nor a potato master who screams, and that is why he allowed a tectonic plate to slip in Lisbon in 1755. That is why natural disasters are permitted to happen. Now biochemists tell us that that is exactly the same process at work in living cells, enabling some of them to mutate and bring about new possibilities for life. The very source of the fruitful history of the earth that has evolved into human beings, the very source of that. And these same processes will enable other human cells to mutate and become malignant. We cannot have one without the other. In other words, the cost of free evolving creation is that it contains the possibility of cancer, or earthquakes, or any other natural disaster. The physical evil which cancer represents is not part of existence because God is inconstant or God is indifferent to human suffering. It is because such things are inescapable in a world that has been given the freedom to grow and make itself. Now does anybody have any questions about this? Don't be bashful. What about human evil? Human evil? God gives you and me the freedom to be who we want to be. We can go to church, we can abide by the gospel and the words of St. Paul, or we can never knock on the door of the church. You don't know any better about that, do you? And we can be as bad as we want to be. We can murder, we can rape, we can do those things. God gives us that freedom. And that is why evil art in some people. Otto Tito was evil. Joseph Stalin was evil. Martin Luther King was evil. That's a good question. Thank you for that. Yes sir. What I'm hearing is that opposites can't exist without each other. You can't have up without fall, you can't have up without down, you can't have good without bad. Without opposites everything is the same. I think it's the same thing. I don't know if God had that in mind when he created the world, but that is the safe way to look at it. Thank you for that. Are there any other questions? Everybody understands you can talk. I'll bet you do. All right.