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Guest (Male): This morning, we're going to tackle the light and breezy subject of Christianity and the problem of evil and suffering as we continue our studies through apologetics. Just as we begin here, let me read from Acts chapter 2, verse 23, a gateway into the problem we'll be talking about this morning, though maybe one that's unlikely.

This is Peter preaching the first Christian sermon after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. He says this amazing line here to the people, the crowd, some of whom had been there that day that Jesus was crucified, but in any event, leaders listening who had condemned Christ. He says this: "This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men."

That will function as a stepping-off point here. Now let's review briefly as we think about this and what we've seen so far. There's the problem that we saw last night of accounting for morality and rationality on the standard evolutionary model. Both the arguments that we reviewed last night would work in either direction. So, when we look at a worldview like naturalism or materialism that teaches nature and the physical world is all there is, we've got a major problem with accounting for things like truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

The standard evolutionary view is self-defeating, and all unbelieving thought is caught in what one scholar called the rational-irrational tension. So, there's an element of rationalism—the view that reason is all you need—in every worldview that's not Christian. And there's an element of irrationalism in every worldview saying, "We don't know, there's a mystery there," so we'd rather believe anything than the gospel.

We've seen apologetics is a clash of worldviews, and the method we've outlined proceeds in three steps. First, we identify the non-Christian's assumptions. We saw that last night looking at some of the problems of science and the materialistic worldview. Look at their assumptions. What do they assume that the method they're advocating for can't prove and defeats what they're trying to argue for? Then, the next step: show that they are unable to account for some feature of reality that the unbeliever takes for granted. We talked about this with some of the laws that we need to use science last night. Then, we show that Christianity can account for that feature.

What we'll be doing this morning as we look at the problem of suffering and evil is work through it using these three steps. Now, here's a few quotes about this thorny problem from Primo Levi, one of the Auschwitz survivors, a devastating and simple way to put the argument against God and against Christianity from evil: "There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God."

His assumptions there, his argument's pretty simple when you look at the massive suffering and evil at a place like Auschwitz, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the gulags of Russia, the terror camps in China today. If you look at those things, then if there's a good God, why would He allow such things to exist? And therefore, He's probably not there. In fact, He is not there; there cannot be God.

A stark way to put this. Then, Sam Harris, one of the leading atheist popularizers, said, "Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes, or He doesn't care to, or He doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick and choose wisely." One might just say at the outset, are those the only three options? I don't think so, as we'll come back to later. But what he says lands with so many people.

As I've read in academic literature and then popular-level objections, this objection is the one that sticks with everybody. It's not so much that science has disproven God. That's a major objection, and we have to work through it, and we did last night. But on a personal one-to-one level, and then working through, again, academic literature, I've seen over and over this is seen to be the knockdown argument against the existence of God and the truth of Christianity, namely, the existence of so much evil and suffering in the world.

Here's the classic statement of the argument from Epicurus—some of you have heard of Epicurean philosophy. This is from a cute little meme I found on an atheist website. Notice the tagline: "Winning since 33 AD," the year that Jesus was crucified. "Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Omnipotent means all-powerful. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent, evil. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"

Now, we'll restate this argument to make it a little clearer, but this is the classic statement of the argument against God from evil and suffering. Restating it more simply, perhaps, than a philosopher would: if God is all-powerful and all-good, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then evil would not exist. Evil exists; therefore, God is not omnipotent and omnibenevolent. That's a breakdown of what Epicurus said.

What we see here is a pretty strong argument at the first blush against God from evil and suffering. If He's all-powerful and all-good, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then evil wouldn't exist. Why would He not stop it if He could? And why would it be there in the first place if He was all-good? We believe that, right? This is a problem for Christian theology that's not going to show up, for instance, in Hindu theology. They don't believe in an omnipotent, all-good Creator. By some accounts, there's 330 million gods in the Hindu worldview.

So, it's only really a problem for Judeo-Christian worldviews because we teach from Genesis that God made all things good, and therefore, where does evil come from? This has been a problem for theologians and philosophers from the beginning of time, from the time of the Fall. So, when we come to it as believers, we have to recognize the objection is against our view of God, what the Bible teaches about God.

Let's go back to Acts 2 quickly there, what we mentioned. Why I focused on that verse was this: there's plenty of places we can go in Scripture, but the reason I focused on that verse is this—did you see how Peter put it? "This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God." Did you see how he put it? Definite plan, foreknowledge. He could have just said definite plan; that would have been fine and wonderful in its summary of how God is sovereign over all things, but he adds another layer.

He says foreknowledge doesn't mean God just knew in advance what would happen; it means that He decreed what would happen. Why do I focus on this verse? Because as we launch into this, we have to be clear in our minds that the greatest evil perpetrated in the history of the human race was the murder of the sinless Son of God. Everything else pales in comparison.

That's not to downplay or minimize the horrific suffering some of you may have endured and that has been perpetrated on our race throughout its sad history. It is to say that from the biblical perspective, the worst thing that's ever happened—and God used it to make it the best thing that ever happened—was the murder of the sinless Son of God. That's why he says, "Definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified."

This is where we want to pause and say, "Peter, which is it? If it's God's definite plan and foreknowledge, then how can you say they did it?" That's where Peter just leaves it there; he doesn't really answer it. That provides us a clue for what we need to understand about God as we think about suffering and evil, and that is this relationship between God's absolute sovereignty and our responsibility.

When you look through the history of theology, it's like there's errors on either side here. There's people who say He's so totally sovereign that we're no longer responsible for what we do. And then there's people who say, "Well, yes, God is sovereign, but man has a role to play to the extent—a larger extent than the Bible allows for—where we have unfettered free will and not even God can control that."

What the Bible does is it never asks us to choose between those two extremes. It leaves them in tension here. Let me just say at the outset here, when people ask, "How do you explain the relationship between God's absolute sovereignty and man's responsibility?" Here's my answer, three little words: I don't know.

I'm willing to bet you don't either, and as I've read, nobody else really does in church history. What we do know is that God revealed it this way, and therefore we submit to it because it's in His word. By the way, that's not irrational because here's the thing: when we begin to work through all the other proposed solutions to this conundrum—and if you believe the Bible, you must face this conundrum because it says over and over again in the Bible things like I was just reading the book of Judges—this was from the Lord, for He had determined to do harm against the Philistines. Determined, planned it this way.

Why did Samson meet his wife? The author of Judges tells us because God was seeking an opportunity against the Philistines. And then you read things like 1 Samuel, Hannah's prayer: "The Lord makes rich and the Lord makes poor; the Lord kills and the Lord makes alive." That's not a stray thought, is it?

So, when Peter says things like "definite plan and foreknowledge of God," he's reflecting a very Jewish, Old Testament-shaped worldview. And then he says what's equally taught in the Old and New Testaments: we are responsible for our sin. We are responsible for the choices we make. We are responsible when we choose to walk away from God, and yet He still is sovereign over everything.

What this ought to do for us, friends, is a couple of things. It ought first and foremost, even as we think about something awful like evil and suffering, it ought to make us worship when we consider the sovereignty of God. What we see a lack of, not only in society in general but in the church today, in the evangelical church, is a loss of wonder at the majesty and sovereignty of God, a loss of the sense of that crucial biblical concept, the fear of the Lord.

You ever read there in Genesis when God names Himself "The Fear of Isaac"? And it's not a fear that is worried like God's a really angry dad who's kind of petulant after a long day at work. That's not how He is. It's a fear that says, "You are the ruler of everything, and I as a creature can only bow in Your presence because You are sovereign and we are not."

It should, therefore, in the first place make us worship, but it should also lead us to see that this doctrine of the sovereignty of God and the corresponding compatibility of human decisions should make us thankful. It should make us thankful because God gives us an answer to this question and this problem of evil and suffering that you will find nowhere else outside the Bible.

Nowhere else. I just finished a marvelous little book by a French reformed philosopher, which is a rare breed these days, okay? It was a study on the problem of evil and Christian theology and very meticulously argued. What I walked away with was, he looked at argument after argument against the biblical teaching and just found them all wanting.

It was a technical work, but at the end, I found myself worshiping as you see afresh the truth that God wants us to know, the answer He gives us in His word to this problem. He wants us to know that suffering and evil are abnormal. They're not a part of the circle of life. *The Lion King* got it wrong; *Forrest Gump* got it wrong. Dying is not a part of living; it's an intruder, it's an enemy. Death, evil, suffering—all of it's wrong from the biblical perspective.

It wasn't meant to be here. Human beings were never meant to refer to each other in the past tense. It's a foreign invader. It's not meant to be here, and God hates it, and He did something about it, as we'll see at the end. Now, before we look at some responses to this seemingly irrefutable argument, let me distinguish between one other thing here: the problem of suffering and evil from a pastoral standpoint and from a logical standpoint.

I want to give you, in a minute here, we're going to address the logical standpoint. I want to offer two different arguments against this to say, here's a response from the Scriptures that refutes this argument. I've read atheists who go, "Yeah, that's a good response. We just don't like that God you're talking about," just like we saw with Richard Lewontin last night. But we'll see that in a second. But let me focus for just a second on this pastoral problem of evil.

Because what I don't want to have happen is that we offer these responses from a biblical, scriptural, logical standpoint, and it comes across as, "See, no big deal. We just got this; it's okay, it's fine." So, we can get at it from a logical standpoint, but from a pastoral standpoint, we have to recognize that no matter how good our responses are from the Bible—and they are there, and they are good, and they stand up to scrutiny because God's word is true—but there still remains that deep ache inside of us that goes, "Why? Why would You do it this way, God? Why does there have to be ads like I saw in the Atlanta airport yesterday?"

Atlanta, this little thing running every two seconds on the train that you take between the concourses: "Atlanta is taking a stand against human trafficking." Why are there things like that? Why are there horrible injustices perpetrated throughout the world? Why are children enslaved? Why don't people have enough water to drink or food to eat?

Why are these things happening? And again, from a pastoral standpoint, that "why" question will never be answered to our satisfaction this side of glory. We have to recognize that. And if you're a Christian, when we deal with people who've experienced suffering and evil in their own lives, we never want to come across as, "Well, hey, we got the answers, and it's no big deal, and God's sovereign. Have a blessed day."

That's not what we want to do. We want to enter deeply into their suffering, walk with them through it, and say, "I don't know all the answers, but I do have God's word for you, and I do want and am committed to walking with you through the pain and the suffering and letting God speak to you through it."

As we'll see at the end, really only the biblical worldview takes suffering and evil seriously, and we'll see how God does that. Now, let's look at a couple of these arguments against that atheist argument. Here's the first one: the reality of objective evil presupposes a standard by which to judge objective evil.

Let's pause there for a second. If we say, "This is evil. Auschwitz is evil. North Korean regimes that torture people and starve them are evil. Slavery was evil." If we say these things, then we're saying there is an objective standard that cuts across time and place and culture so that it's wrong to kill people for their faith in the first century in Africa as it was in the 20th century in Europe.

That's an objective standard. It's not just culture or time-bound. So, when we say something is evil, we are making an absolute statement, and that assumes that there's a standard by which to measure that statement. Here's the second step: if there is no God, as we saw last night, there is no objective standard by which to judge evil.

There's fundamentally only three ways to get to a standard by which to judge things, good or evil: "we," "me," or "thee." That's it. When it comes down to it, how do we know things are right and wrong, good and evil? There's three options on the table. Yes, I recognize there's sophisticated varieties of these options, but there's the "we" option, the cultural option: we determine what's right and wrong, good and evil.

But the problem with that, of course, is when one culture does something that the other judges evil. My wife and I had this discussion recently. She is studying to be a family nurse practitioner. In one of her textbooks, there was a sidebar about how to diagnose or rather how to treat and care for, from a healthcare perspective, people who practice female genital mutilation, female circumcision, practiced widely in Muslim cultures.

Here's the thing: at the end of this textbook that, of course, was not written from a Christian standpoint, it said, "You basically can't judge their culture. You can't say this is wrong to do this to little girls. You simply must treat them." I was shocked reading that, going, "By any standard, it's wrong to mutilate young girls' genitals. Period." No, you don't just treat that; you say to them, "You can't do this."

What it brought home to me was the whole notion that there's different cultures now, and we can't say things in certain other cultures are wrong. We have to be able to do that, friends. It's wrong to kill people for believing differently than you do. It's wrong to take the life of an unborn child. It's wrong to enslave people. I don't care where you live or what timeframe we live in; those are always wrong.

We have to be able to say that today, and we are fast losing the conceptual world by which to say things are evil between different cultures. By the way, during the Nuremberg trials, one of the Nazis very brilliantly got what I'm saying here and what this argument is trying to say. He looked at the tribunal of these nations around the world going, "Who are you to judge us?"

His lawyer was basically saying to the Nuremberg authorities, "Who does America get to say they are? How about Russia? How do they get to sit on this panel and judge this Nazi guy? You've got plenty of your own sins to answer for." Now, as a matter of fact, I think they were right, of course, to condemn and judge the Nazi Germans, but his argument brought to the fore a problem that has not gone away.

Because do you know what happened? They came up with something called ad hoc law. Ad hoc is Latin for "to the moment." Now, all of us would agree with the ad hoc law that was enacted by the Nuremberg authorities which condemned Nazi Germany for their awful crimes against the Jewish people. But here's the thing: when we have to go, "We need to make up a law to say it's wrong to kill people," that's not a good thing, even if we agree with that law, because it only takes a generation or two before that law becomes shifting, and it's no longer a law and it can be used against other things that we might now call good and a later generation calls evil.

My point is simply this: if we take the option that says "we" determine what's right and wrong, good and evil, we'll never know what is right and wrong and good and evil because it will change with each culture. Then there's the individual option, the "me" option: "I" determine what's right and wrong, good and evil.

That might be the predominant view today. It's kind of the Wendy's view of morality: do what tastes right. That's what we see all around us, people saying, "That's true for you; it's not true for me." Or, "That's right for you; it's not right for me. Who am I to judge?" Inevitably in these discussions, people will say, especially in the Bible Belt where I live, "Well, Jesus said, 'Do not judge, lest ye be judged.'"

It's true, He said that. But He also said in John 7:24, "Judge with righteous judgment." So, which is it? Jesus is saying you don't get to be a personal judge; you don't get to do selfish, reactionary judgment. But He does want us to be discerning, and He does call us to make moral judgments, and He does call us to say some things are good and some things are evil. And if everybody, every individual, gets to determine what's right and wrong and good and evil, then guess what? There's no objective standard; it changes with each individual.

Then there's the "thee" option, and that's what we're saying here. God is the One who, as the Eternal Father, as Son and Holy Spirit, as the Trinity, as the Creator of all things, as the One who gives us His word to tell us what is right and wrong and good and evil and true and false—He is the standard. His word tells us how to measure what is right and wrong and good and evil. And if He is not there, we are adrift in an endless night, and there's no hope, and there's no such thing as good or evil.

That's why we see so much confusion today about these topics, and it should scare all of us. I'm not trying again to be a fear-monger, but it's concerning when we've lost the vocabulary to name things as evil. That's what we see without exception in the media, in the opinion-makers, saying, "Well, I'm not really sure we can say that's evil."

Once we're there, we as Christians need to step back and say, "No, God tells us what's good and evil," and we stand there. Therefore, the conclusion of this argument: the reality of objective evil presupposes God. Once again, back to our method we outlined at the outset: non-Christian assumptions can't account for morality, and Christianity can.

Now, second argument, let's go more to the matter here. God is all-good, God is all-powerful, evil exists; therefore, remember Epicurus's argument? God doesn't exist. Now, as a number of different scholars have pointed out, the easiest way to refute that argument is to add this crucial premise which is biblical: God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists.

Now let's pause here again, because this is a hard statement to take in. I want to just walk through it briefly. When we say that God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil that exists, what we're saying is this: that there are purposes and designs in the evil and suffering that goes on in this world that we won't understand.

Once I read this and then I actually saw it up close: if you've ever been to Europe and you go to these great medieval castles, and you see the tapestries on the walls that are beautifully and intricately woven—most of the time you're not allowed to touch them—but if you look at the back of one of those, it is a mess of tangled threads. It doesn't look like anything but just all these threads everywhere. You turn it on the other side, and it's this beautiful picture.

God's sovereignty and providence with evil in our lives are like that. They look like a tapestry that is a mess from our perspective, but from His perspective, He sees the whole picture. He sees what He's going to do with suffering and evil. The place to go in Scripture for that is Genesis 37 through 50 and the life of Joseph.

You ever considered that? Where you look at Joseph and everything's going well for him, and then his brothers sell him into slavery. Then he's forgotten in prison for years. Moses, as he's writing Genesis, only gives you that one comment: "and he was in prison for three years." Now, let's unpack that just real quickly. That's not prison in modern-day 21st-century America.

That's not three hots and a cot; that's not cable television, access to education. That's sitting in a hole in the ground in ancient Egypt, barely surviving, rats crawling over you, disease-ridden water dripping on you. In the middle of it all, don't forget that he had had those dreams. He had had God visit him personally.

He had been unjustly put there. Think about that: he is serving faithfully in the house of Potiphar, and this wicked woman accuses him of adultery, which is totally false. He was actually running from sin; he was doing the right thing, and now he's in prison. And then there's that glimmer of hope: "Maybe this guy will remember me when he gets back to Pharaoh," and he doesn't.

"I will, I got you, Joseph, man. We'll get you out of here, buddy. I thank you for telling me the dreams that are going to come true. I'm the cupbearer, everything's going to be great. Thank you, awesome, I'm out of prison." And he forgets. Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and months turn into years.

And then God comes again at His perfect timing, and Joseph is exalted to the second most powerful man in Egypt. Then think about this: when you read in Luke and in Matthew the genealogies of Jesus, you're going to find Joseph all over them. What that teaches us is that in God's sovereignty over 1,500 years before Jesus lived, God preserved the line of the Messiah through all of these events in Joseph's life.

So, when we get to the scene where he breaks down and embraces his brothers, and he says to them after his father dies—and they're worried like, "Joseph's now going to turn on us, our dad has died, we're going to be in big trouble. Jacob's gone, and what's going to happen? What's going to happen to us?"—and they come to Joseph: "Don't kill us, man, we sold you into slavery. We're really sorry. You're the man we're not, the sheaves are bowing down. The prophecy is fulfilled."

How easy and delicious would it have been for Joseph to take revenge? Because we love to savor revenge moments. We love to roll it around in our tongues, and it will kill us when we do that. The Bible makes that clear. Joseph instead says what we're trying to say here with this premise: "You meant it for evil, and God meant it for good."

Can you imagine saying that? I'm going to be honest; I don't know that I'd have the faith to say that after what he'd been through. I have a weak estimation of what I would do in that situation. It's easy to quote that verse as kind of like a proof text, right? "See, God works all things for good," Old Testament equivalent of Romans 8:28: "All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose."

It's neat, and it's tidy. Those are both true statements, but let's go underneath them. Let's go and put ourselves in the shoes of Joseph and go: "You've been in prison. Your brothers sold you into slavery, and you say, 'Yes, but God.' He rules. He does all things well." And that's what he says.

There we see the faith that understands God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists, and we may never know why. That's the hard thing; that's the debilitating thing about evil, right? We don't know why sometimes these things happen. When I was on staff in Jackson and watched a family bury a five-year-old who died from cancer, you ask, "Why?"

Then you see wicked men and women living long, prosperous, healthy lives, and we see that expressed in the Psalms by Asaph. He says, "I thought, I looked, and they're rich and they're sleek and they're fat, and everything looks awesome for them. Why, God?" "Then I went to the temple of the Lord, and I considered their latter end."

What you see throughout the Scriptures is this deep trust in the sovereignty of God, culminating at the Cross. Let's not forget that Jesus knew He was going to the Cross. That was part of His self-identity and self-consciousness. When He was a little boy helping His father work in that workshop, He knew what was coming.

He knew that the hands that were fashioning houses and places to live and things for those dwellings were going to be the hands that were one day nailed to the wood that He helped make the molecules for, as it were. He knew. Luke 9:51: "He set His face to go to Jerusalem." He knew it was coming.

And in the midst of the greatest test He'd ever faced in the Garden of Gethsemane, what is His prayer? "Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me." Don't please, let's don't diminish the humanity of the Savior there. He's fully God and fully man, the Bible teaches. He's scared. There's a medical term for what's happening when He sweats drops of blood. There's a condition of such stress upon the human body that your capillaries can burst when you start sweating, and that's exactly what's happening to Jesus because He's fully human.

Then He says, "Nevertheless, Your will be done." It was that simple prayer from the Savior that allows all of us hope in the midst of suffering and evil. It allows us to believe this is true when we say God has a morally sufficient reason. It allows these not to be empty words but rather a summary, I hope, of scriptural promises.

Therefore, the conclusion is the existence of evil does not disprove the existence of God. When we think about the Savior, that is the solution. The Cross is the solution to the problem of evil and suffering. Because in Christianity alone do you meet a God who takes evil and suffering so seriously, He becomes involved with it personally.

You'll search in vain throughout the long and sad traditions of the philosophies and religion of mankind to find anything close to a view of God like this. God does not remain distant from suffering, as we'll see in a minute from a quote I want to share with you. He comes down and takes it upon Himself.

The One against whom the greatest evil was perpetrated is the One who willingly stayed on the Cross for us, who willingly gave His life for us so that evil and suffering do not have the last word. "Behold, I am making all things new," He said. Behold, there will be a time when there will be no more funerals.

I love this image from the book of Revelation: God Himself will wipe away every tear. Can you think about that for just a moment? The Bible reveals a God who cares about your tears. The Psalmist says, "You have stored my tears in a bottle." He knows every one of our tears, and there will come a day when He wipes them all away.

He gives us a guarantee of that in the Cross. The Cross stands as a testimony for all time that evil is just a dash and not a period in the history of the human race. Evil—yes, but God. Not "evil period," as those atheist arguments would have us believe. "Evil—yes, but God."

In the sunlight of a beautiful Pennsylvania morning—it's 82 and about 90% humidity in my town of Columbia right now, so I am going to wish we were outside because that's going to be our lives until right around Thanksgiving down in South Carolina. When we think about evil in the beauty of a setting like this and this morning in this bucolic countryside, it's easy to say that, and we wonder, will I stand up if it comes knocking on my door?

The Cross also tells us an answer for that. It says when suffering and evil come in our lives, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." That's the wonderful thing about Jesus, of the many wonderful things: that He doesn't ever walk away from our pain and our suffering. He takes it personally, and He gets rid of it on the Cross.

That's what led this author to say, "God is not a spectator when it comes to evil. He does not determine to create a world with evil and then simply watch to see how His pitiful creatures will manage it. Rather, He determines to create a world in which He will involve Himself personally and painfully in the resolution to the problem for which we ourselves are responsible."

Let me pause right there. When it comes to suffering and evil, we do it. God is sovereign, but we do horrible things to each other. We're responsible for those actions. Adam brought that into our race through his sin. That's just one other point to note here before we finish up. Adam's sin is the reason why, the root cause why we sin. It's transferred to us, it's reckoned to our account, and therefore what we do when we choose to do evil is we reaffirm the sinful choice of our covenant head, Adam.

Boy, that'll cut against the grain of some 21st-century representational republic thinking like we have in America, where you didn't get a choice in who represents you. We were all born into Adam, Romans 5:12 through 21 says, and we all suffer because of Adam, and we choose daily to reaffirm his sinful commitment. We're responsible for this evil. We don't get to look at God and say, "The devil made me do it."

No, we do this. That's one way I would say that we begin to understand grace better because grace will never be amazing, it will be plain, it will be uninviting, it will be uninteresting to you if you haven't grasped the fact that the longer you walk with Jesus, the more you see how wicked your own heart is. The more you see, the more I see how sin has its tentacles around our hearts in ways that we can't possibly fathom.

And in His mercy, God does not show us all at once. As we walk with Jesus, He shows us more of His grace for every little bit more He shows us of how twisted and tangled and mixed are the motives of our hearts. In the midst of it all shines the Cross.

That's why it finishes up this way: God comes as the God-man in the person of Jesus Christ, and He comes to die. We are content, even constrained, gladly and expectantly, to exclaim with the Apostle Paul, "O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God," Romans 11:33 to 36.

When we understand God's design in the Cross as the solution to the problem of suffering and evil, remember what Paul is doing there in Romans 11. He started that argument in Romans 9, chapter 9, verse 1, when he said, "I could wish myself accursed for the sake of my countrymen." Take that in. Take that in.

The previous eight chapters have seen Paul unfolding the glories of knowing that you are saved not by what you do but by God's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. It is the most complete treatment of that doctrine in the entirety of the New Testament. Then you get to Romans 9, verse 1, and it's like the record comes to a screeching halt, and Paul says, "All that I've unfolded, I'd give it up to see my Jewish countrymen come to Jesus."

And then he proceeds to argue through some of the most difficult teaching in all of the Bible, and we won't enter into that today. What we will do is go to his conclusion when he says, he's arguing, "Well, if the gospel's true, why don't all the Jews believe?" And he answers that argument again and again, and then he finishes up, and here's what he says: "If they're God's chosen people, Paul," here's the Jewish objection, "why don't they believe? What's going to happen to them?"

And he gives the answer, but then what he does is what he calls us to do, and that's what this quote gets at. He ends saying doxology: praise to God. And when he considers the sovereignty of God in election in Romans 9, and when he considers why some are saved and others are not—and that's one of the great mysteries of our lives, and if we're honest here today, if you're a believer and you step back and think about it, you resonate with what Paul says because you know you didn't do it.

You weren't smarter, I wasn't smarter than others. We weren't more morally inclined than others to believe. The only reason we believe is because God sovereignly opened our eyes by the Holy Spirit, John 3:5, John 6:37 to 44: "No one comes to Me unless the Father which sent Me draws him." And so, as we pull back and say, the only reason I'm saved and my eternity is secure is because God did it, then and only then can you finish up with, "O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!"

It's only when you end in Paul's doxology of Romans 11:36 that you see the full and bright glory of the Cross when it comes to the problem of suffering and evil. For one day, as Paul guarantees, speaking under the inspiration of God's Spirit, one day evil will give way to doxology all because of Jesus. Let's pray.

Thank You, Lord, for a sure word, a steadfast word, a certain word in the midst of a changing world. Please bless us as we consider these things. Please help us to stand in the day that evil or suffering comes knocking on our door. Let our faith be fixed on the One who will keep us and bring us safely home, even Jesus. We pray in His name. Amen.

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