“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree; so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Sometimes a song is just right. Why it hits that mark is hard to fully explain. And, different songs manage to accomplish this feat for different people. But when it happens, you just can’t forget about it. I don’t mean that it is just permanently stuck in your head. That wouldn’t be much fun at all. But rather, you keep coming back to it. Even when you haven’t actually listened to it for quite some time, you find yourself humming along with it from totally out of the blue. Today’s song of the season is one of these songs for me. This morning, I’d like to share it with you.
This week we are in the third part of our teaching series, Confident in the Face of Hard Questions. This will be the most emotionally challenging stop on our journey. This week we are going to tackle the question of why there is suffering in the world created by a supposedly good God. This is a deeply emotional question with intensely personal elements to it. You have perhaps asked this question yourself. You certainly know people who have even if you didn’t know that about them. The answers to this question won’t be easy, but they are good. Let’s dive in together to see what the Scriptures have to say about it.
Why Do We Suffer?
There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now in Gaza. There’s an ongoing one in Ukraine. China is still keeping millions of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps in the Xinjiang Province even though that has dropped out of the news. That is in addition to that nation’s ongoing and vigorous persecution of Christians…who make up a larger percentage of the population than Chinese Communist Party members. Azerbaijan has launched a genocidal effort to exterminate or otherwise forcibly relocate all of the Armenian Christians in a disputed border region between the nations, leading to massive suffering on the part of tens of thousands. Muslims in Pakistan are becoming more and more aggressive in their persecution of Christians in the nation. So are Hindus in India. The two nations don’t like each other, but they both agree that they hate Christians more. A category five Hurricane hit the Pacific coast of Mexico last week from which the recovery efforts have only just begun. A shooter in Maine just last week murdered 18 and injured another 13, some critically. Several people in our own community have had their lives disrupted just recently by unexpected, unwelcome, and scary news that bodes for a very difficult road stretching out in their near future.
“Now at midnight the Lord stuck every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and every firstborn of the livestock. During the night Pharaoh got up, he along with all his officials and all the Egyptians, and there was a loud wailing throughout Egypt because there wasn’t a house without someone dead. He summoned Moses and Aaron during the night and said, ‘Get out immediately from among my people, both you and the Israelites, and go, worship the Lord as you have said. Take even your flocks and your herds as you asked and leave, and also bless me.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
God is going to one day bring judgment on the earth for all the sin that has been committed on it over the course of human history. Now, a great deal of sin was covered by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Actually, all of it was covered, but this covering only extends to those who have been willing to receive it. That’s the problem. Not nearly everyone has accepted His gracious gift. Many have and will yet decide to bear the weight of their sin on their own. They pridefully believe themselves capable of handling the load. They will be proven disastrously wrong in the end. That will indeed be a terrifying day. We know this because the mere snapshots God has given us of judgment in the Scriptures are themselves terrifying to behold. The final plague was a judgment against the sins of Egypt. Let’s talk about what is going on in these hard verses, and why they point us to a God worthy of our devotion.
“So Moses said, ‘This is what the Lord says: About midnight I will go throughout Egypt, and every firstborn male in the land of Egypt will die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the servant girl who is at the grindstones, as well as every firstborn of the livestock. Then there will be a great cry of anguish through all the land of Egypt such as never was before or ever will be again. But against all the Israelites, whether people or animals, not even a dog will snarl, so that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come down to me and bow before me, saying: Get out, you and all the people who follow you. After that, I will get out.’ And he went out from Pharaoh’s presence fiercely angry.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
In the animated film from DreamWorks Studios about the Exodus, Prince of Egypt, the real climax of the film is when the Angel of Death moves through the city inflicting the final plague on the people of Egypt – the death of the firstborns. Even for an animated offering for kids, the scene is disturbing. The animation is scary enough, but the concept is what is really horrifying. We read this dryly and move on to the next part of the story in part because we don’t want to think about what is happening here. Indeed, when Moses writes about the actual event in the next chapter, he doesn’t describe it in any more detail than we see right here. Today, though, let’s wrestle a bit with what is going on here and what to make of this final plague.
“So they took furnace soot and stood before Pharaoh. Moses threw it toward heaven, and it became festering boils on people and animals. The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were on the magicians as well as on all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had told Moses.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
One of the most challenging aspects of a healthy, orthodox, biblical theology is getting the balance right between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. The uncomfortable tension the Scriptures consistently hold is that both positions are entirely correct. Making sense out of that, though, isn’t always easy, especially when we encounter passages like this one. Here we are at another plague that is again worse than the last one. But this time, God is implicated by the language for the ongoing tragedy of the plagues. Let’s talk about what’s happening here.
The Nexus 