Tag: The problem of evil

What to Do When the Wheels Fall Off

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We’ve all been there before. You were going along, enjoying life, and all of a sudden, tragedy strikes. There’s no good explanation for it. There’s no justification for it. There’s nothing obviously good that could possibly come from it. It’s just evil. Right in your lap. The problem of evil has been one of the most vexing plaguing humans since time immemorial. Something in us knows the world isn’t like it should be, and we’ve long since struggled to explain why it’s not. Evil, though, tends to be something experienced personally, not academically. So, academic answers won’t often do. Personal ones are best. In the Scriptures, we find just such a personal answer in the story of Job. For the next three weeks, we are going to take a look at his remarkable…and remarkably hard story to see what wisdom we can glean for our own hard experiences. Let’s get started.

What to Do When the Wheels Fall Off

Several years ago, I saw a movie called The End of the Spear. The movie is about a group of missionaries who were martyred in the course of their efforts to advance the Gospel. Most famous among this group were two men named Jim Elliott and Nate Saint. In 1955, Jim, Nate, and three other missionaries were attempting to make contact with the Huaorani tribe deep in the jungles of Ecuador. The tribe was known to be very aggressive toward others, especially outsiders. After making several initial peace offerings by lowering various goodies for the tribe down in a bucket from their plane, the team finally decided that it was time to make personal contact with the tribe. On the morning of January 3, 1956, they landed and met some of the tribe members for the very first time. This was one of the first times the tribe had had any contacts with outsiders. They were received with excitement and hospitality. It was looking like things were going to go smoothly. This road for advancing the Gospel was appearing most promising. But just five days later, everything fell apart. 

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Waiting Is the Hardest Part

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God has an answer to all of the injustice and unrighteousness around us. It’s a pretty good answer too. The trouble is that the timing of His answer isn’t what we want it to be. This is what Habakkuk experienced in his conversation with the Lord about the brokenness of his culture. It’s what we often experience in our similar conversations and complaints. As we continue in our new teaching series, Asking God Hard Questions, we are going to see some encouragement God gave to Habakkuk and talk about why it is still important encouragement for us to receive today.

Waiting Is the Hardest Part

I grew up in the age of Nintendo. The Atari, of course, changed the world by ushering us into the era of the universally accessible video game, but the Nintendo took things a giant leap forward. And the most famous and most enduring icon of the age of Nintendo (that can still earn over a billion dollars at the box office, almost 40 years after its release), is Mario. Do you remember playing the original Super Mario Brothers game on the original Nintendo? Man, I do. I played every level of that game more times than I can even begin to count. I mastered the infinite lives hack in world 3 level 1. I made speed runs where I saw just how fast I could get through the whole game. I think the fastest I ever did it was 15-20 minutes. That’s not completely terrible, but it’s also not very good when compared with the world record. And, yes, there’s actually an official Guinness World Records category for fastest original Super Mario Brothers completion time. The current world record is 4:54:63. Well, the Guinness Record is a fraction of a second slower than that, but the guy who set it later unofficially beat his own record. For comparison, the fastest time possible to finish the game period (and which has heretofore only been achieved by a computer) is 4:54:26. In other words, a human is on the cusp of achieving what we previously only know to be computer-enabled perfection. 

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How Not to Comfort the Hurting

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In part two of our series, Grace in Hard Times, we take a look at the conversation among Job and his friends as they wrestle with the awful tragedies that have befallen him.  Their attempts at comforting gradually transform into attempts at condemning him when he won’t play ball with their notions of how the world works.  Along the way, we learn an important lesson on how to approach getting our minds around the hard times we face.  Keep reading to find out what it is.

 

How Not to Comfort the Hurting

Have you ever been sure you were right…until you learned you weren’t?  Tell me if you’ve been here before.  One day we were getting ready to go to the pool and I had asked Noah to go to the garage to get something for us to take.  We weren’t planning on making it a long trip and so to the boys’ disappointment we pretty severely limited the number of toys they were going to be able to take. Read the rest…

What to Do When the Wheels Fall Off

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Evil is present everywhere in our world.  We can’t escape it.  We can only try and deal with the aftermath.  This fact has long seemed deeply at odds with the idea of a good and loving God.  The problem of evil is one of the thorniest challenges that has long seemed a roadblock to the Christian faith.  In this new series, Grace in Hard Times, with the help of the book of Job, we are going to examine through the context of this epic story one powerful answer to the problem.  In this first part of the conversation, we start with a bit of perspective.

 

What to Do When the Wheels Fall Off

A few years ago the news came out that Elizabeth Elliot had passed away at age 88.  Elliot had been serving the Lord in various capacities for nearly her entire life.  What she is perhaps best known for, though, is having been married for a short time to Jim Elliot.  Jim was every bit as dedicated a servant of the Lord as Elizabeth was, but his story did not end in the same way hers did.  In 1955, Jim and four other missionaries, including Nate Saint, were attempting to make contact with the Huaorani tribe deep in the jungles of Ecuador.  After making several initial peace offerings by lowering gifts in a bucket from their plane, the pair finally decided it was time to make personal contact with the tribe.  On the morning of January 3, 1956, they landed and met with some of the tribe members for the first time.  They were received with excitement and it was looking like things were going to go smoothly.  This road for the advance of the Gospel was appearing most promising.  But just five days later everything fell apart.  When the tribe warriors came out of the woods that morning to the Amazonian beach the missionaries were using as a landing strip and campsite, they did not come for peace.  They came to shut down this outsider intrusion into their private lives.  Nate, Jim, and the three other men with them were murdered in cold blood, speared to death by the Huaorani warriors.  They each left behind a wife and a total of 10 kids among them.  These five men had committed their lives to serving Jesus and advancing the Gospel regardless of the costs.  They were selflessly committed to this goal and yet this was their end. Read the rest…

An Absentee God

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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…