The End of Evil?
02/03/2008 - Evil is a Four-Letter Word
A few days ago we received an email from someone in our church asking us to pray for a family that was the victim of a fire that destroyed their home and two businesses. The mother survived, but her two children, ages 3 and 6, didn't. It was a horrible tragedy. And as a parent, I can't imagine the pain that mother must be going through. Why God? Why would you allow such a thing?
On Thursday night Jennifer Carter, went to a viewing for a neighbor's niece, a one year old little girl who lost her life after battling an illness since birth leaving her family devastated. Why God? Why did that have to happen to this innocent little girl?
At our Leadership Team meeting on Tuesday, someone shared an update on their boss' son, a 24 year-old young man, who this past summer ran into the ocean to cool off, dove into a wave, hit the bottom, and is now a quadriplegic. How tragic!
Recently Ken Burn's documentary called "The War" has been airing on PBS. The story reminds us how horrific war can be. Over 50 million people died in World War II, most of them civilians. So where was God when those people were being blown to pieces? Where was God when Jews were being gassed by the thousands at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps?
Everyday tragedies occur that can shake our faith and cause us to call into question the very existence of God. If God is so good, why is the world so bad? How can a loving God exist in a world so full of accidents and illness, genocide and child abuse, AIDS, torture and terrorism? The problem of evil has confounded the world's best minds for centuries.
I'm sure many of us can point to an experience in our lifetime that has caused us to ask, "God, why? Why me? Why now? I just don't get it." "God, if you're so good, why is the world so bad? Why is my world falling apart right now?" Surveys indicate that that question is the number one reason many people give for not believing in God, at least, not in the God described in the Bible.
Put another way the dilemma looks like this:
If God is all powerful, he could destroy evil.
If God is all good, he would destroy evil.
But evil isn't destroyed.
Therefore, there is no all powerful, all good God.
At first glance, that argument seems to make a lot of sense, enough sense to keep lots of people from putting their faith in God. So what's the answer? Where is God when it hurts?
This morning we begin a brand new series called The End of Evil? It's a series based on what God says in the Scriptures about evil and on an excellent new book written by theologian N.T. Wright called "Evil and the Justice of God."
The problem of evil in our world is not simply a philosophical one. It's a real, practical problem that we all come up against every single day. In the Lord's Prayer Jesus told us to pray that we would be delivered from evil. He knew we would wrestle with it.
If the dream of God is to one day live at peace among his people on this earth, then evil in all its expressions is the nightmare of God that has to be dealt with first. We are not experts on evil and this series is not going to answer all our questions. In fact, I'm convinced that many of our questions can't be answered, at least not now.
But what we hope this series does is show all of us that God takes evil seriously and that he has done something about evil, he is doing something about evil, and he will do something about evil. And along with that he has equipped us as Christ followers with practical and powerful ways to come up against evil in this world until his kingdom comes. He has not left us defenseless against the evil.
The dictionary defines evil as "something that is morally reprehensible, sinful, wicked, something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity." But we don't really need to define it, do we? We all know evil when we see it.
The first mention of the word evil in the Bible is found in Genesis 2:9 where we read, And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground - trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now wait a minute. Let's stop and ask some hard questions here. Why would there be a tree of evil in God's good garden? I can understand the tree of life, because God's into life. He's all about life. But evil? What's that about?
A few verses later we read in Genesis 2:16-17, And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Okay. So God plants a tree of good and evil in the garden and then tells Adam not to eat from it. Hold on. If God doesn't want him to eat from it, why does he put it there in the first place? It sounds like a setup. It sounds like a trick.
The best explanation I've ever read for why God put a tree of good and evil in the garden comes from C.S. Lewis who did a lot of thinking about the subject of evil. Evil he says comes from a good thing called freedom. We all want to be free, right? Over the years men and women have laid down their lives for freedom. "Live free or die" is the motto of the state of New Hampshire. Freedom is a good thing.
So Lewis says, "God created things which have free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."
So the freedom that gives us the ability to love also gives us the ability to hate. The freedom that gives us the opportunity to choose good, also gives us the chance to choose bad. God could have made us all robots and programmed us to obey him. That would have eliminated all the evil in this world, but it also would have eliminated all the love in this world too. And that was too big a price for God to pay. So he took his chances and gave us freedom.
So there's a tree of life in the garden because God's into life and there's a tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden because God's into freedom. And that tree becomes the test of whether the first man and the first woman will use their freedom to love God.
But there's something else in the garden as well. There's a serpent in the garden, a creature that is opposed to God and everything he stands for. We meet him in Genesis 3:1, Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
And in Genesis 3:4-5,"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Of course, that was a great lie wasn't it? While the man and the woman didn't die physically the moment they ate the fruit, they did die spiritually and became separated from God. They didn't become like God, as the serpent promised, but they did become acquainted with good and evil.
And again we ask, "How did the serpent get in the garden in the first place?" The details are sketchy, especially in the book of Genesis. The serpent just appears without warning or any explanation. Yet any discussion of evil has to factor in the evil one, the satan, the adversary of God. Evil is not only something morally reprehensible, evil is someone, a being, a person, or a subperson as Wright likes to say. And we will look at satan in this series.
But why would God create such a sinister being hell bent on destroying his good creation? I thought God only created good things? Again Lewis helps us here when he says, "If we understand free will, we see how silly it is to ask the question, 'Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong.' The better stuff a creature is made of - the cleverer and stronger and freer it is - then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong."
The evil one wasn't created out of bad stuff. God can only create good stuff, but the good stuff went bad. At one time the evil one was the pinnacle of God's creation, his best and brightest, who then used his freedom to rebel against his creator and ever since he's been opposed not only to God, but to humankind, and all creation as well. God is into the life. The evil one is into death.
So just three chapters into God's great story the whole thing falls apart. God's dream becomes a nightmare. And in many ways we are still living in the midst of that nightmare. But it won't last forever. Let me leave you with some good news today. And the good news is that evil and every expression of evil in this world will one day come to an end. There will be an end to evil.
I'm guessing that in one way or another most people love the water. We love the ocean and long walks on the beach. Some of us love to swim and body surf, dig for sand crabs and search for shells. In fact, most of us could use a vacation like that right now!
So when we pick up the Bible and come to the end of God's grand story of redemption and read Revelation 21:1 I get real sad. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
What? No longer any sea? Wait a minute! We love the sea. There has to be some mistake here. So we look up the word in the original Greek hoping it means something else and discover that the Greek word for sea means "sea, lake."
But then we realize that this statement is found in the book of Revelation which is apocalyptic literature and apocalyptic literature is filled with all kinds of symbols and images. And the sea in the Scripture is often a symbol of chaos and judgment and evil.
Genesis 1:1-2 starts out with these words, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The first image of the sea in Scripture is chaos.
We don't have to read very far into the story until we come to Genesis 6 and discover a universal flood that destroys the earth and everyone on it except for Noah and his family. The sea is an instrument of judgment.
We see the same thing when we read the Exodus story and discover how God brings his people safely out of Egypt on dry ground, but then buries the Egyptian army under the roaring Red Sea.
In Daniel 7 and other prophetic passages monsters come out of the sea that are symbolic of world empires that are opposed to God and to his people. In those passages, the sea is an image of evil. More often than not, the sea in Scripture is this dark, foreboding place out of which evil emerges that threatens God's people like a giant tidal wave threatens people who live near the coast.
So when God says that there will be no more sea in the new heaven and new earth that's a symbolic way of saying that there will be no more evil there. Evil will finally be conquered when God's great kingdom comes. There will be an end to evil and to the evil one.
That's God's promise. That's our hope. Revelation 21:4 puts it this way, He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
No more evil. No more sea. But for those of us who love to swim and snorkel and scuba dive there will be a river of life as clear as crystal. Revelation 22:1 says, Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
God is committed to bringing his story to a happy ending. And he will. But it hasn't come yet. Evil is still very much a part of our world. In fact, at times it seems like evil just keeps gaining momentum doesn't it?
Wright puts it like this, "There has always been evil, but it seems to have come home to the Western world in a new way. The older discussions of evil tended to be abstract and philosophical. Just as Auschwitz posed the problem in a new way for the previous generation so September 11, 2001, the tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina of 2005, the earthquakes in Pakistan and Kashmir have now jumpstarted a fresh wave of discussion about what evil is, where it comes from, how to understand it, and what if anything, can be done about it …. Politicians and the media have tried to live as though evil weren't so much of a problem after all, but they are having to wake up to the fact that evil is still a four-letter word … The sea is powerful, but God the Creator is more powerful still. Evil may still be a four-letter word, but so, thank God, is love."
And love is what this table is about this morning. The Lord's Table reminds us that God is love and in his love he has done something about evil. God is not detached from our pain. He feels our pain. Evil cost him his own son. Someone has said, "The answer to the problem of suffering is not an answer at all. It's the Answerer. It's Jesus himself. It's not a bunch of words. It is the Word. It's not an argument. It's a person. Are we broken? He was broken too. Are we despised? He was despised too? Do people betray us? They betrayed him too. Is life unfair to us? Life was unfair to him too. I wish God had given us more information, but instead he gave us a person. And he wants us to believe in that person who suffered for us so that one day we will suffer no more."