In this second-to-last part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we tackled what is perhaps the stiffest challenge to the Christian faith ever recorded: The problem of evil. How do we who confess our belief in a God who is good account for all the evil in the world? That’s perhaps a bigger question than we could answer over the course of a single sermon. What we can do is talk about how to respond to those who are struggling with it personally. That is exactly what we wrestled with in this message. Keep reading to see what we discovered.
An Absentee God
I read a story a couple of weeks ago about a serial killer in Russia. The man was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 22 women. Recently he confessed to additional murders for which he had not been previously convicted. Fifty-nine additional murders to be precise. If you’re into math, that makes 81 people—mostly women—whom this monster raped, likely tortured, and murdered. He was a police officer the whole time. When he was off-duty, he would offer to give young women walking on the side of the road a lift home. Over a span of more than twenty years, eighty-one times somebody’s daughter disappeared without any apparent trace. Let’s just go ahead and ask the hard question: How, in a world presided over by a God whose goodness is affirmed over and over again by billions of His followers, is something like this allowed to go on for so long without recourse? Read the rest…
The Nexus 