Why Should I Thank God for Fixing a World of Pain and Sin That He Created?

00:00

Why Should I Thank God for Fixing a World of Pain and Sin That He Created?

February 13, 2023

Questions about why we should love and thank God for creating a world where pain and sin exist and then fixing it by sending his son.

* Why should I love and thank God for creating a world where pain and sin exist and then fixing it by sending his son?

Transcript

[Music] Welcome to the #STRask podcast. Hi, Amy. Hi, Greg.

This is Amy Hall and this is Greg Koukl. Hi. All right.

Here's a question from Patrick Garmo. Why should I love and thank Jesus for creating a world where I'm not a human. Why should I love and thank Jesus for creating a world where pain and sin exist and then fixing it by sending his son.

In Dr. Frankenstein's monster, the monster is like us and the doctor is like God. Wouldn't God have been better off if no one ever existed? Certainly less pain and suffering. Well, it's a fair question and this falls broadly into the category of the problem of evil and the question is, was it worth it? Now, I deal with this question and the story of reality, but lots of people have addressed that.

And the answer is, we're not in a position to be able to assess that. Okay. And here's an illustration I use in the story of reality that Greg Gansal uses in his book, Thinking About God, which is a great introduction to the philosophy of religion.

And don't let that phrase scare you. It's very, very accessible. And in fact, when I wrote tactics the first time, the first edition of like 14 years ago, I would read Greg's book, you know, to get my word spithing rhythm because he's so accessible in the way he converses with the writer.

But in that book, he says there are some things that we're in a position to know and some that were not in a very good position to know. If there were an elephant in the room, we would know that. Okay.

But we're not in a very position to know, good position to know if there's a gnat in the room. We may not see a gnat, but that might be because we missed it because it's small. So there are some things that simply put we're in a good position to know I or nay and other things that were not in a good position to know I or nay.

And this question falls in that second category. Was it worth it? Is this a better situation, the way God set it up that there would be a fall and there would all be the suffering, et cetera, et cetera. With the subsequent salvation that came through Christ and the new world that God would make and the eternity that would follow.

Is that better than if God hadn't created anybody and there was no suffering to begin with? Nobody going to hell, nobody going to heaven. Guess what? Here's the answer. I don't know.

And we are not in a position to be able to know that. The only person that's in a position to be able to know that is the person who sees everything and knows everything and that would be God himself. Now, I know to some people this may sound a little bit circular, but I'm not making the point that it is a better place.

That's not my point because God did it and God will do it properly. Although I think there is an argument there. I'm really making a different kind of point.

I'm saying just because we can't see how some suffering and difficulty and pain and anguish could be worth it in the long run that God would allow it for some greater good in the long run. Just because we can't see that doesn't mean it's not there. Now this, by the way, is a response to what's called the inductive problem of evil.

And the inductive problem of evil is simply saying it's not making the case. Well, if there's a good powerful God that he'd be able to get rid of evil, he'd be willing to get rid of evil, but we have evil therefore that kind of God doesn't exist. That's called the deductive problem.

It's largely answered. And in fact, my philosopher is not even asked anymore, but the other one is the inductive. Well, maybe we can't demonstrate to a powerful defeat that God doesn't exist because of evil, but it's unlikely he would exist because the amount of evil in the world is not justifiable.

Okay, well, the problem is how would we know it's justifiable. In fact, I was challenged by on that issue by a professor. Okay, you tell me what the reason is for all this evil.

And my response is, I can't give you the reason for all this evil. I'm not God. But just because we can't think of a reason doesn't mean there isn't a good reason.

And so what I'm trying to do is just deflect an attempted defeater here. There is no way we can know this. The way out of this, this kind of conundrum is to bank on the kinds of arguments that are compelling, that God exists.

One of those is the moral argument, which also essentially lays the foundation for God being a good God. Because the moral argument is that there is good and evil objectively in the world, and it turns out that there is only one way to ground that, and that is a morally good God. And without a morally good God, you can't have any categories of good and evil that are incumbent upon people, obligations, moral obligations.

So if we need God, who is perfectly good, to have any morality at all, and we do have morality, we know that because of the problem of evil and broken rules, bad things, then God must be good. And if God is good, then it's likely he had, since he knows everything, he realizes that it was worth the effort morally speaking, to suffer all of the anguish of a fallen world to accomplish a greater good of the world that he will bring to pass. So, Patrick's asking here, why should I love and thank Jesus? I think he meant God here because he talks about him sending his son.

But I think you can't evaluate a method unless you know what the goal is. So, he says, why should I thank God for creating a world where pain and sin exist? The answer is, well, you have to know what God's goal is, and you have to know if this is meeting that goal before you can't decide. And I think there's an assumption here that nothing is worth pain and sin, the existence of those things.

Well, and this is where it comes in, Greg, where you said, you know, we don't know, so we can't respond to that. Well, we can't assume that there's no good reason. That's the thing.

Right, yes, right, yes. So, but here's the thing. What we do know, we do know some things from the Bible about God's goal.

And so, if we can look at the goal of God, we can see, okay, does this method actually meet that goal? Now, is the goal to have no pain and no suffering? Well, I can already tell you that's not the goal. That's obvious. Okay, so already, I think Patrick has missed this.

I think this is the key thing here, where he's not seeing anything beyond our own pain and suffering. But there are a lot of things that are bigger and more important than our pain and suffering. And we know this even in our own lives because parents will cause their children pain and suffering for good reasons and to accomplish good things.

So, any parent who has no pain and suffering as the ultimate goal for their child is going to be a terrible parent. Now, obviously that applies in a fallen world. So, that's just in the human area.

Now, let's talk about analogy though. It's just an analogy. Yeah.

So, when it comes to God, what we know is that he says that he's doing all this for the praise of the glory of his grace and read Ephesians 1 and 2 and he talks about this. He has created this world and he says that he had the eternal goal of having Jesus on the cross. So, why would that be? If his goal is to be to the praise of the glory of his grace, then Jesus dying on the cross for us reveals something about God that can only be revealed in a world with sin and suffering.

So, let's say that's God's goal. Maybe God wants to reveal this greatest glory of his that can only be revealed in a world. Not can only exist because obviously God is who he is no matter what else is going on around him.

But in terms of revealing it to us, it requires a world with sin and suffering. So, if that's the case, we come to the question, is it worth it? Now, your answer to that question will depend on how you see God. If you don't really care much about God, then you don't really care much about seeing him in all that he is.

But if you love God and you do believe that he is the most glorious being in the world that we will be with together with him forever, then you want to know him as fully as possible. And that is your greatest goal and you're willing to go through anything to get there. I think about Johnny Eric's and Tada saying she wouldn't trade her wheelchair for anything.

No, she was paralyzed when she was 17 or 18. I can't remember. And she has gone through tremendous pain, chronic pain, cancer for decades.

And she says, "I wouldn't--" Well, she's my age. She's a little older than I am, as a matter of fact. Yeah, so it's been a long time.

And she says, "I wouldn't trade my wheelchair for anything because she knows that her suffering has been worth it because of what it's revealed to her about God." The goal. Yes. It is met the goal.

So if this method meets the goal in a way that no other method could, that's why we should thank him for it. Now, we're not thanking him directly. I don't think we need to directly thank him that bad things have happened to us.

But we thank him for what he's doing through a fallen world for the sake of our good and for his glory. And it's both those things. We see God working in both of those things all the time.

And the best example of that would be with Lazarus, where he lets Lazarus die. And he says that he died so that Jesus could reveal his glory. So not only did that reveal Jesus' glory, but it also allowed the people there to see his glory, which was worth it and was for their good.

So there are a lot of reasons, and we haven't even touched on building character and all those sorts of things. But if we're talking about why we should thank God for creating this world, it's because he created a world where the cross would exist and reveal God to us in ways that would increase our enjoyment of him for eternity. So there's so much more to be said about this and people have thought about this a lot more than I have.

But those are my thoughts. And I think the first thing you have to do is get out of this idea that a lack of pain and suffering is always the greatest goal because it isn't. You know, I don't know, it's Patrick, right? Yeah, I don't know Patrick's own convictions here.

But so much of this depends on a point of view. Okay, so I have teenagers, and I'm trying to instruct my teenagers in a way that will have a long-term consequence for virtue in their lives. What they can't see, and they can't see it because they're teenagers, they don't have the life experience to see how pieces of our lives fit together in a particular way.

Okay. And so when, when I was just thinking about the conversation I had the other night, but a number of years ago, I confessed on the air that my dad was right about a whole bunch of things I didn't think he was right about. And I did that because I think it was Father's Day and it was kind of a homage to him.

And he had said, "When I was a kid, and boy, who hasn't heard this? When you're older, you'll understand. You'll realize that I'm right." Okay. And I was saying, "You know, Dad, you're right.

I am older now and I understand that you were right." And a whole bunch of things, you know, and I tip my hat to you kind of deal. But sharing that experience with my daughter made no sense to her. Not any sense at all.

Well, I kind of shrugged it off, smiled. Of course not. Now, I just use that as an illustration because it's an illustration many of us who are certainly adults and parents who understand fully because we know that's the way life works.

There are things that life works by a certain set of rules and parents understand those rules largely. And so they're trying to teach their children how to operate within a world of rules, how to operate successfully in a satisfying fashion. But the kids don't understand that.

This way they push back. That's a stupid reason. It's dumb.

That's what parent hasn't heard that, right? What do you do? You'll see. When you're older, you'll understand. We tell them the same thing our parents told us.

And then they say, "No, we won't." Well, this is where it comes down to trusting you. Ultimately, if, you know, let's take this out of the child area and back to God, ultimately this comes down to trusting God because there will be a lot of things we won't understand why they're happening. So we can only look at this in terms of big picture things.

Do I know why a certain thing has happened in my life? Sometimes, but sometimes not. So, except in the larger picture that I just... Sometimes you learn down the line years later, you see how it fits in, right? Right. So this is where it comes down to trust, and this is where the Bible comes in.

You have to be so familiar with the Bible and to be able to meditate on the things that we've seen God do in the past, how He's shown His faithfulness, how He's worked in people's lives, even in the midst of suffering, why the suffering occurred, what came out of it. If you see Him working over time and also not even in the Bible, but also in the lives of other people who have suffered. So many people have written books about these things.

There are a lot of books out there. See what God did, see how it worked out. Just meditate on these things because your goal right now is to trust God even when you don't understand.

Now, this is something we've talked about so many times, Greg. We talk about suffering a lot, and most things, I don't repeat the questions very often, but this question in particular about suffering and all the different angles, I think is probably the number one question I get, not only here, but also in person when we're at our conferences from students. As the Hippologist.

Yes, I have a table at our youth conferences, and I get tons of questions about evil. And I think one of the problems is that our churches do not talk enough about how to deal with suffering because there's this idea that we're supposed to be these overcomers, this is how we make our lives perfect, and there's an inability to talk about the reality of suffering. I call it an inappropriate triumphalism that you find in a lot of churches.

Everything's fabulous all the time, and we're just praising God for all the wonderful things. And sometimes I'll make this point, and this is my quick answer to the word "faith movement," which trades a lot on that theology, is that as you mentioned, first Peter was written to suffering Christians, okay? First Thessalonians was written to suffering Christians. Second Thessalonians was written to suffering Christians.

Hebrews was written to suffering Christians. Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 2 Timothy at least were written by Paul when he was in prison. So when you look at that, just that quick summary, where do people get the idea that everything's going to be your 60s alert here? "Hunkie Dory," or maybe that's 50s, I don't know.

Everything's going to be wonderful for us if we just get our act together with God. No, in this world you have tribulation, Jesus said. And he's overcome the world, but that doesn't mean he's taken us out of the world.

In fact, in that prayer, right, Upper Room Discourse there in John 17, he prays the Father does not take them out of the world, but keeps them in the world, keeps them. That is, cares for them while they're in the midst of this kind of thing. This is a very challenging balance for Christians to manage a lot of time, but it's all over the text.

Just as Jesus Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves for the same purpose. 1 Peter 2. Why are you so surprised that this fiery ordeal that's among you has of something strange is happening to you, 1 Peter 4, the end of that chapter, and those who suffer according to the will of God, and trust yourselves to a faithful creator in doing what is right. Okay, these are all passages.

How do I know those are? It's because I read the book enough that these things stand out to me, and I take encouragement from those passages because I realize that all of the things that I desire for fullness and satisfaction, happiness, however you want to characterize it, is not to be found in this life. We get tastes of it, but it's a life that God is preparing us for where the... Gee, I'm trying to remember the line. It was just like I read it last night.

Right after Frodo tosses the ring into the deal, you know, and the golems gone and the ring is gone, and then there's some statement that Sam Wise Gamgee says, and he talks about the tears of life being forgotten. It's very, very well put by Tolkien, but see, that's in the future. Tears are in this life, and we commit to that to some degree, living virtuously, but ultimately what our hearts long for, C.S. Lewis pointed out, is not to be had in this life.

What we really long for is to be had in another life, and then that will be fulfilled so richly that Paul can say, "I do not consider the sufferings of this life to even compare to the glory that is to follow." Roman Zayn. And again, I think a lot of people where their minds go when they think about what's to come in the next life is, yes, that's when sin and suffering will cease and everything will be happy. But that's not what we're looking forward to the most.

What we're looking forward to the most is being with God. And so why should you thank God for creating this world? Because ultimately we will be with him and we will know him better than we would have in any other kind of world. And if you can keep that goal in mind, so many things will make more sense in this life.

Well, Greg, we took another whole episode for one question. I was going to try and squeeze one in, but I think I'll save it for the next time. Patrick, we hope that's helpful though, and it's a challenging issue.

There's no question about that. And it's not an unusual question. Right.

So hopefully that will help you think about it in a little bit different way here. All right, thank you for sending in your questions. Send us your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #STRask or go through our website.

Just go to our hashtag #STRaskPodcast page and you'll find a link there. We look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kolkle for Stand to Reason.

[MUSIC]

(upbeat music)