Grace Thoughts

Announcer: God loves you. Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: This world, this universe was designed. It didn't happen by accident. We know that there is a God and we know that he's personal. Now, okay, who's the God? We get to the next level of arguments and we start talking about the authenticity of the scriptures, our New Testament and Old Testament scriptures, how accurate they are, and the most reliable documents by far of that time area.

We look at the claims of Christ. Who did Jesus claim to be? God. What did he claim to do? Die on a cross, rise again, and pay for the sins of mankind. Do we have anything logically to tell us that didn't happen? No. Everything we have points to exactly what happened. This man Jesus died on a cross and this man Jesus wasn't in the grave three days later. It's not that debatable if you're going to be honest with yourself.

Okay, so we have a God. He created everything. He made us really unique and special. He says that he's love. He says that he's for us and that he's merciful and that he's kind and that we're his unique creation. Then why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen? Or maybe you want to put yourself in this equation. Maybe say, "Why did this bad thing happen to me? If God is all you just said he was, if he is in control, the sovereign ruler of the universe, there's none higher than him, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, he answers to nobody, he's absolutely free, and he says he's love?"

Well, if this is love, I don't want anything to do with it. I don't feel that loved by this sovereign ruler of the universe. I'm not saying this from a first person, I'm saying this is what happens inside men and women as we wrestle with these things. God is good, God is loving, God is all-powerful, God knows everything. Then why do bad and terrible things happen to his people?

The argument is, well, he must not exist. The most compelling argument against the Christian faith is the presence of evil. The other ones are easy, but explaining the sovereignty of God and the presence of evil in the world and evil against God's own people is a hard argument, especially if you've been afflicted. Let me read you this quote. It's rather long.

"Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard what we can conceive as good? Doesn't all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? What do we have to show that God is good?" This man is saying, "I can show you evidence that he isn't good, but what do I have to show you that he is good? We set Christ against it.

But how if he were mistaken? Almost his last words may have had perfectly clear meaning: Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? He had found out that the being he called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what he had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded. Step by step we were fed, led up the garden path. Time after time when he had seemed most gracious, he was really preparing for our next torture."

Wow, that's pretty raw language. The man who wrote that wrote a book about eight years before this called The Problem with Pain. He's probably the greatest apologist of the last 200 years, his name was C.S. Lewis. He wrote this after The Problem with Pain. He wrote The Problem with Pain as an apologist, as a man to try to explain, as he did in so many different forms, the existence of God and how we process pain.

But this is what happened. He wrote this in a book called A Grief Observed. This was never supposed to be published in his initial writing. You see, C.S. Lewis didn't get married till his 50s. He waited because he never found the right woman and he finally found what he considered the woman of his dreams, the perfect woman for him, and they married. Three years later she died of cancer. He waited his whole life for her and she was gone.

So as he processed God: "How could you do this? Why couldn't you have changed this? Why couldn't you have healed her? I wrote a book on miracles, too. God!" So he started questioning everything. If you read the book A Grief Observed, it was compiled from his own journals and published much later. It's very raw as he continues through his journey. Now, grief, deep grief, unchecked, will redefine who God is.

This is the truth. Sometimes really bad stuff happens to people, anybody and everybody. There are no promises or there are no guarantees. Good people, people who help others, innocent people, true and real victims of evil, will all scream against God, the God of all grace, unless they see really the full scope of God's sovereignty and understand God's sovereignty.

Next point, and an important one: because God is pure love, and he is, and because God is good, he must give his creation, that's you and I, he must give his creation free volition. Love demands a choice. Without a choice, there can be no love. We'll illustrate it this way. I'm stealing an illustration from Chip Ingram, I thought it was a good one.

Let's say there's a purple pill. You're a single lady and you've been waiting for the man of your dreams to come into your life. So this person comes up to you and says, "Look honey, come over here. I got something for you." It's this guy out of the back of his trunk in New York City. He says, "I got this purple pill. If you find a man that you like, you just pick him and you slip this purple pill in his drink and he drinks it, he will love you like no other for the rest of your life."

So she goes to the gym and finds a guy that's sort of buffed and says, "Hey, I'd like to take you out to dinner." "Okay." So he goes out to dinner at this nice restaurant. She says, "Look!" and he turns around and she slips the little purple pill right in his drink. He drinks it and all of a sudden: "Marry me! You are so beautiful, I can't live another moment without you. Please marry me now. I don't want to wait. Now!"

"I want to carry your purse through the mall. I want to watch you touch all the clothes in all the racks and not buy anything. I want that. I marvel and I just think your indecision is lovely. I love it when you can't make up your mind. I want to sit across from you in restaurants like this and have you look at the menu for 45 minutes before you can make up your mind what you want to eat."

"And I can't wait to come home after a hard day of work and clean the house because I don't want you to do anything. And I can't wait to give you a foot massage and cook you dinner." The woman's like, "Oh, this is so wonderful!" And they get married and it's all come true. He's everything that he said. He's walking through the mall with her purse and just happy.

"Let's go, yeah, let's go to J.C. Penney and touch everything. That'll be fun. I just like being with you. And after this we can go talk. I just like to talk. Yeah, I know the Super Bowl's on, but I'd rather talk with you than watch the Super Bowl because you're so much more important to me than football and sports and what the rest of the men in the world really like."

She's just happy. Three months, four months pass by. She's like, "Oh, this is the greatest ever!" Then all of a sudden this thought comes to her. "What would he be like without the little purple pill? Would he still love me? Would he still want to treat me like this? Would he still care for me like this if I didn't slip him that pill?"

You see, there can't be love without free volition. God did not make us robotic. He didn't make us to love him. He had to give us the freedom to choose. Just like people choose to go to hell and they choose to know Christ, he had to give it to us. Because God is love and his love is perfect and his love is free, he understands real love gives the other a choice.

Real love does not demand from the other and manipulate the other. Real love always presents to the recipient of that love the freedom to choose for them to respond or not to respond. My friends, because of this, sort of picture it this way. I'll go back to this illustration, but picture this. You're in a cruise and you're going from New York City to London.

God's in control of the cruise ship and he knows exactly when that ship is going to leave New York City. He knows exactly how long, how fast he's going to travel through this predetermined route, ocean route. He knows exactly when it's going to arrive in London. It's a plan, a predetermined plan, and he's the captain of the ship. He takes off at a certain time from New York City and they travel at a certain nautical speed across the ocean and they arrive right when they're supposed to arrive in the city of London, or wherever they land in England.

Now, God didn't necessarily control what was happening on that ship. The people on that ship were eating, they were dancing, they were gambling, they were going to shows, they were swimming in pools. They were doing whatever they do on a cruise ship, that's what they were doing. In other words, there's all sorts of living in that journey from one point to the next point, let's call this life. There was all sorts of living to be done.

Now, did God know when the ship would leave? Yes. Did he know when it would arrive? Yes. Did he really know what people were going to do on the ship? Yes. But they made those choices. The people who went to gamble chose to go gamble. The people who went to the show chose to go to that show. The people who chose to sleep in that morning chose to sleep in that morning. The people who chose to go ashore, they chose to do that. They had the freedom to choose, yet they were still definitely in the midst of God's perfect plan and journey.

Not a perfect illustration, but there are no perfect illustrations for this. We do the best we can. Because we have free volition, man can and has chosen to do evil. It's that simple. You go to other countries, there's a lot of evil. Life is cheap. Life is cheap and cheaper here in our country because man chooses. We have a choice for certain things that we choose. God can do what he wants to do and because he is free and he is all-powerful, he's all-knowing, and he's all-loving and he's sovereign, he does what he desires to do, whether we understand it or not.