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The End of Evil?

03/16/2008 - Evil's Finest Hour, Selected Scripture

The 1960's were a tumultuous time of upheaval and change in our country. Anybody here remember the sixties? President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 and the whole country went into a collective state of shock. That was the first time I ever saw my mother cry. During the mid-60's the war in Vietnam escalated with no end in sight. And as the body count climbed we started to wonder, "What in the world are we doing in Vietnam anyway? Why are fighting a war in a country so far away? It doesn't make any sense!"

As the decade continued more and more protests began, some were peaceful, some were not. 1967 was declared the summer of love and in August of 1969 over a half million "hippies" gathered at Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, for a festival called Woodstock, three days of love, peace, and music.

Just a year before, in the span of about two months, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated. King was only 39 years old, and at the height of his influence. Kennedy was 42, hoping to be elected as the next President of the United States. It seemed like the sky was falling!

And in response to those tragedies Dick Holler wrote a song that an artist named Dion recorded in 1968 called "Abraham, Martin & John." In the song, Abraham refers to Abraham Lincoln whose life was also cut short by an assassin's bullet. The song sounded like this. Play Abraham, Martin & John (3:15 min.)

Anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young.
You know I just looked around and he's gone.

Anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young.
I just looked around and he's gone.

Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young.
I just looked around and he's gone.

Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free,
Some day soon, it's gonna be one day.

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill.
With Abraham, Martin, and John.

Abraham, Martin, John and Bobby, they freed a lot of people. They tried to find some good for you and me. But it always seems the good they die young.

This morning we remember another good man who freed a lot of people but who also died young. His name was Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, who also walked up a hill at the height of his influence, and was hung on a cross at the age of around 33.

Today we continue our series called The End of Evil? with a teaching I've called "Evil's Finest Hour." I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true. The day Jesus died evil had its finest hour. At the crucifixion of Jesus Christ all the forces of evil converged to assassinate God. It was a horrific conspiracy. And in six hours the evil deed was done. God, in the person of his Son Jesus, was killed on the cross.

We've been saying all through this series that during his lifetime Jesus accomplished what the nation of Israel failed to do. Remember Israel, Abraham's descendants, was supposed to be the solution to the problem of evil. They were to be a blessing to this world. They were to represent God and his love to all creation. But instead of being the solution, Israel became part of the problem. The rescue squad needed to be rescued themselves.

So Jesus, an Israelite, the seed of Abraham, one member of that rescue team, becomes the obedient servant that God intended Israel to be. Jesus becomes Israel in person. He embodies all the hopes and dreams that God had for Abraham's descendants to be a treasured possession, a holy people, a kingdom of priests. Jesus becomes the light of the world who would rescue God's creation from the darkness of evil. But before he can do that he has to take on evil full force and exhaust its power. Hit me with your best shot. Fire away!

The parallels between Jesus and the nation of Israel are amazing and intentional and they begin at his birth. Shortly after Jesus was born in Bethlehem an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream saying inMatthew 2:13, "Get up! Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." There was a price on the head of Jesus the moment he was born. He was a dangerous baby. From day one the forces of evil ganged up on him. They wanted to see him dead. There was an evil agenda out to get Jesus.

And so in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, Joseph and Mary take Jesus to Egypt and there they live until they're told that the evil King Herod is dead. And that, Matthew tells us, is to fulfill the words of the prophet Hosea who wrote in Hosea 11:1, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son."

God is making this parallel between Israel and Jesus, calling them both "my son." So just like the nation of Israel came out of Egypt, so Jesus comes out of Egypt too. And just like Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea, so Jesus passes through the waters of the Jordan River where he's baptized by his cousin, John, and God announces from heaven inMatthew 3:17, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."

God wasn't real pleased with his first son, Israel rebelled, but he's very pleased with his Son Jesus, the true Israel. And just like the nation went from Egypt into the wilderness to be tested for forty years, so Jesus after his baptism enters the wilderness to be tested for forty days and forty nights. And like Israel in the desert he's tempted to renounce God and bow down and worship the evil one. But unlike Israel he will not worship a golden calf or any other idol instead he says in Matthew 4:10,"Away from me, Satan! For it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'"

The parallels continue. In the Exodus story we read that the nation of Israel went up to the mountain to receive the law of God. So in Matthew 5, Jesus goes up to the mountain to give his great teaching that we call the Sermon on the Mount. And there he tells his Jewish followers that they are to be the salt of the earth, they are to be the light of the world, a city set on a hill, servants who love even their enemies, people who turn the other cheek, and go the second mile. And all the things Jesus tells them to do, he does himself. He turns the other cheek when he's slapped in the face, he picks up a Roman cross and goes the second mile, he's the one who will be set up on a hill called Golgotha, the place of the skull. He's doing all the things that Israel failed to do. He's the true Israel, the beloved Son called out of Egypt with whom God is well pleased. All God's hopes for defeating evil are pinned on his Son Jesus and he's not going to let his Father down.

But part of fulfilling the role of Israel also means accepting punishment for Israel's failure. That's what the prophet Isaiah is talking about when he writes in Isaiah 53:4-6, 8 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. ⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. ⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all... ⁸For he was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people he was punished.

In his book Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright puts it this way, "Jesus had warned his people of God's impending judgment for their failure to follow his call to be the light of the world.Jesus had totally identified with Israel as the Messiah, the Servant, taking its vocation on himself, coming to the point of pain, of uncleanness, of sickness, folly, rebellion and sin. Jesus was thus taking on himself the direct consequences of the failure and sin of Israel. He was dying quite literally for their sins. This is not a piece of strange or arbitrary theology read into the narrative at a later stage. This, the gospels are telling us, is what it was all about all along. Jesus was taking upon himself the direct result of the ways in which God's people had failed in their vocation.

"The great, dark, horrible power of evil was bearing down on him, and Jesus had long realized that as Israel's representative he, and he alone, had the task to do what Israel's God has said that he and he alone could do."

Ground zero for evil's finest hour was the cross. When Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane just a few hours before his crucifixion he said to those who had come to get him in Luke 22:53, "Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour - the hour when darkness reigns."

Using the image of the tsunami and 9/11 Wright goes on to say, "It was time for the evil which dogged Jesus' footsteps throughout his career - the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul - to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over the head of God himself. The spear went into his side like a plane crashing into a great building. God has been there. He has taken the weight of the world's evil on his own shoulders.

"On that night evil was given free reign to do its worst in ways for which the soldiers, the betrayer, the muddled disciples, and the corrupt courts were merely acting as players in some great drama. The mocking of the bystanders as Jesus hangs on the cross echoes the taunting, tempting voice that whispered in the desert and even in the garden. The power of death itself, the ultimate denial of the goodness of creation, speaks of a force of destruction, of anti-world, anti-God power being allowed to do its worst. The tortured, young Jewish prophet hanging on the cross was the point where evil had become truly and fully and totally itself.

"The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfillment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which all of world history turns."

Jesus died on a Roman cross. The cross was Rome's brutal way of enforcing peace in the empire. Crosses were erected everywhere and anyone who challenged Rome was hung on one. "You cause trouble," Caesar said, "and this is what will happen to you." And victims were left hanging on crosses until their bodies would bloat and rot and stink and decay and be filled with maggots and become food for vultures and dogs. There was political peace in the world when Jesus came, the Pax Romana it was called, "the peace of Rome." And Rome used the cross to keep that peace through fear and intimidation.

So Jesus takes the cross, this symbol of peace enforced through torture and brutality and redeems it by turning it into a symbol of peace that comes through love. Jesus makes peace, not by shedding the blood of his enemies like Rome did, but by shedding his own blood. Jesus takes a symbol of evil and turns it into a universal symbol of love. And all of world history spins around the cross.

Colossians 1:19-20, For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

But on the cross Jesus didn't only die for the sins of Israel, Jesus died for your sin and my sin. He died for the sin of the whole world. We've all made contributions to that tidal wave of evil that came crashing down full force on his head that day. He died to give his peace with God.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 5:1, 6-8, We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ … You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Not only did Jesus represent Israel to God, he represented the whole human race to God. Not only did Jesus accomplish through his life and his death what Israel failed to accomplish, but Jesus accomplished everything that Adam failed to accomplish. That's why he's called the second Adam or the last Adam.

Unlike the first Adam, when Jesus was tempted, he resisted. He didn't cave in. Unlike the first Adam who hid from God in the bushes, Jesus walked with God in the cool of the day for a lifetime until he cried out from the cross, My God, my God why have you forsaken me. That, I believe, was the finest second of evil's finest hour. That was the moment when the full weight of evil came crashing down on Jesus' head.

God's response to the problem of evil in this world is not to give us a philosophical explanation. It's not a comprehensive answer about what evil is or what evil isn't, or why bad things happen to good people. That's not what he asks us to figure out. Nor is it a list of suggestions about how we should adjust our lifestyles so that evil will somehow disappear. Instead, God's response to evil in this world is an event that deals with it head on, an event that cost God his one and only Son. At the crucifixion of Christ, the Creator of the universe took full responsibility for what happened to his creation and bore the weight of all its problems on his own shoulders.

Somebody put it this way, "The nations of the world got together to pronounce judgment on God for all the evils in the world, only to realize with shock that God had already served his sentence."

And how does God do it? He does it by taking the cross, Rome's symbol of might and power, of torture and execution, and transforms it into a symbol of love, because love, God's love, is the most powerful force in the universe.

The apostle John, who witnessed the crucifixion with his own eyes, would later write in 1 John 4:9-12, This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.¹²No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The problem of evil is not just a cosmic problem. It's a problem about me and about you. Remember the line of good evil runs right down the center of each one of us. And God has dealt with my problem and with your problem on the cross through his Son, Jesus Christ. He did it for all the evil that I contribute and you contribute to this world. And now he's asking us to believe that and to live like we believe that by pushing hard against the darkness with his love. Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.