This teaching is a fifth of five in a series entitled, Daughters Welcome, by the Reverend John W. Howe of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The title of this teaching is, How Can a Good God Allow Pain and Suffering? Tonight we're going to be talking about the problem of evil, more particularly the problem of suffering. I think the problem of suffering and pain is only part of a larger issue, philosophically or theologically. I want to begin with the larger issue and then try to focus in a little bit.

I'm not sure that there's going to be a whole lot of comfort and pastoral care if you're in the midst of pain. There may be some kind of a world view that would be of help to you, but we're trying to deal with the theoretical, the theological questions that are raised rather than to minister to somebody who is himself or herself in the midst of suffering tonight. So if I fail to deal with you gently enough, forgive me for that.

That's simply for the lack of time and what we're trying to deal with in terms of a series of lectures. Second thing is that I think there probably has been, down through the ages, no more provocative and disturbing question. The professor who was most influential in my undergraduate career was a professor of philosophy, and it was only after I had known him for several years very well and thought of myself as very much a friend of his that I learned that he was an ordained minister and that he had given up the practice of the ministry and had retreated into the teaching of secular philosophy because of his inability to answer the hard questions caused by people's suffering.

And he would go and he would try to minister to the sick and the bereaved and the dying and he was a man of great compassion and great love but when people would say, how can a good God allow this to happen? He found himself unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. And I frankly think that is truer than we might want to admit.

That there has been no more profound question. There may be more interesting ones, but there's been no more disturbing question for anyone who accepts the concept of a loving God than to say how do you reconcile that with pain and suffering in the world? More broadly, that's what we're going to come to before we get done, but more broadly than that, let's define this as the problem of evil because it's not just pain and suffering but it's moral evil, it's the whole schmear and many, many philosophers and theologians have addressed this.

David Hume summed it up probably as succinctly as it could be and he put it this way. if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Now those are kind of heavy words.

It simply means all. Omni means all. If God is all-powerful, and he's all-knowing, and he's all-good and loving, how could there be any evil?

It would seem, says Hume, as if God is all-powerful and could destroy it, and is all-knowing and is aware that it's there, but is not all-good. Or, he is all-knowing and he's all-good, but he's not all-powerful. As much as he's opposed to evil, he can't overcome it.

Or, as one wag put it, it's a sarcastic remark, but it really gets to the point, he is all-powerful and he is all-good, but he's a little bit stupid. Somehow he's unaware that in his universe an infection has begun to spread. That would seem logically, philosophically, as if you have a mutually exclusive situation.

If that's the way God is, then when's evil? Well, some philosophers have tried to deal with that by redefining the nature of God. We might laugh, but some very serious philosophers have argued that God is, in fact, less than all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.

Edgar Brightman, for instance, was one of the very famous American philosophers of the last generation up at Boston University. And his thesis was that God is a limited God. He's infinitely more powerful than we might be able to imagine, but he is not all powerful.

Breitman would stop short of giving to God that total omnipotence, total supremacy, and say God is against evil, wants to crush it, wants to overcome it. That's his struggle, and we by faith believe one day he will. And the choice of faith is that we would ally ourselves on the side of good rather than the side of evil and help him do it.

That's a very serious philosophy that he argued. Others have taken the other side of the equation and have tried to redefine evil. And somebody even as profound a Christian thinker as St. Augustine did that.

And St. Augustine's argument was that evil is not really a something. Follow this. If it were a something, then God would be responsible for it, but it's not a something, it's a nothing.

It's the absence of good. And how can you be responsible for something that isn't there? Very interesting argument.

I'm not going to try to get into any of those alternatives. They would be fascinating, and we could spend many, many hours, and that's what you'd go to philosophy courses for. I'm not going to do that, Because my opinion is that though the scripture certainly does not use any of those three words, it does not speak in technical philosophical language, there is no doubt that the biblical view of God is, without any question, that he is all-powerful, totally opposed to evil, he knows it's there, and yet it exists.

He has not destroyed it. So we need to come directly to the problem exactly as Hume and many, many others have posed it in its hard form. Not redefine the nature of God and not try to explain evil away and say it doesn't exist.

It does exist. God knows it. He's against it.

He could destroy it, but he hasn't. That's the problem. And what shall we say about that? Well, I think there are at least four things that we need to say.

I'll put them all in a negative, state them negatively. I would answer, as it were, four assumptions that might be hidden under the phrasing of that dilemma. Okay?

Number one. Omnipotence is not the power to create a self-contradiction. Stick with me.

That may seem a little bit unrelated. I think I can bring it to you in a minute. We need to understand what we're saying in calling God all-powerful.

There are many things that we might mean by it, but there are also some things that we cannot mean by it. When we say God is all-powerful, or if we use the technical word we say God is omnipotent, we're saying he can do anything. Okay?

But a self-contradiction is not something that anybody, including God himself, could do. it is nonsense alright for instance to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he could create a square circle alright that's not a factor of how much power you have a square circle is a contradiction in terms it makes no sense it is an empty concept there is no concept there to say God is all powerful does not mean he is any more capable of creating a square circle or a round triangle than you are would you buy that? You understand what I'm saying?

To say that God can do anything is not to say that he can do something that is a logical impossibility. It is no more a factor of power than it is a factor of weakness to do a logical self-contradiction. That is relevant to our question because I want to suggest to you that God cannot create a world in which both free choice and the impossibility of evil exist at the same time.

That in, if you'll buy what I've just said, that that does not, this is a signal for not, does not equal self-contradiction. It is a self-contradiction to say, free choice exists and yet evil is impossible what does it mean to say that the choice is free what does it mean to say that I can choose good if I can't choose against it alright we haven't yet defined what evil is but if my choice for good is limited. If all I can do is good, that's the only option I have, what does it mean to call that a free choice?

If those two things are a self-contradiction, to say free choice and the impossibility of evil are self-contradiction, then calling God omnipotent does not make him any more able to overcome that dilemma than it makes you. Okay? it seems to me that our goodness means absolutely nothing unless we freely choose it ok if I have a gun in somebody's back and you don't see that and I walk that person through all of the right choices ok under threat of death if that person stops at the stop sign because I'm going to shoot him in the back if he doesn't do it if he pays his taxes because I'm going to shoot him in the back if he doesn't do it you know on the surface of things it might look to you like that's a very upstanding righteous member of society but immediately you discover that I'm holding the power of death as a threat over his head what meaning does his choice have anymore?

it's not his choice it's my choice right? if God programmed me such that all I could ever do is choose the good what does that mean anymore? or if he programmed the world in such a way that good was the only thing to choose.

What does that mean? You go to the ice cream parlor and they say, we'll give you any flavor you like so long as it's vanilla. You can get a Model T for it in any color so long as it's black.

Your choice doesn't mean anything. My first statement is to say that there is such a thing as free choice, which is the only basis on which goodness could be ascribed to somebody. to say there is free choice and turn right around and say there is no possibility of evil is a self-contradiction.

And calling God omnipotent does not make him capable of overcoming that self-contradiction. That is not something that he can do any more than he can create a square circle. Are you with me?

Two. Evil is not the opposite of good. but good gone wrong okay let me take you through that think of the worst person in history that you can think of whoever your choice might be Hitler, Mussolini, Khomeini whoever it might be all right the Shah depending on your politics I don't care think of whoever whoever is the blackguard of all time all right what made him such an overwhelming figure of evil?

Intelligence, charisma, eloquence, initiative, creativity, drive, organizational ability, etc., etc., etc. All of which attributes are in and of themselves good things, but he's misusing them. And I think if you would worry that a little while in your mind, that you would quickly see that evil has no independent reality to itself. To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, it's a parasite off of good.

It feeds off of things which are themselves good things. You cannot think of something which is pure evil. As soon as you begin to describe to me what constitutes pure evil, you're going to begin to come up with attributes which in and of themselves are good attributes.

Gone wrong. Now that will lead you to a rather startling conclusion, I think. Perhaps I can diagram it.

If you were to make a picture of everything in all creation, obviously you can't because you don't know all that exists, but theoretically we could make a chart or a table of everything that exists in the whole universe. And now we'll rank this in terms of nobility or excellence or qualities which make for, what should we say, God-likeness, excellence. We have to put God at the very top.

God himself, obviously, is that than which there is none greater. And that everything else that we're talking about that he's created, we would rank probably according to the degree to which it is like him. You follow my line of thinking?

All right? So you'd put up here the highest archangels, right? Assuming they exist.

And beneath them, other angels. And scripture says that man was created just a little bit lower than the angels. So we'll put man at the top of the rest of the chain of being.

And then what? The higher animals, the ones that are most intelligent, most responsive, most like ourselves. See how pride we are.

What would we say? The porpoise. Orangutan or whatever it is, right?

The higher animals. Of course, there may be other things in other worlds of which we know nothing. And then the lower animals.

I suppose not too many people would argue that the worm is somewhat less than the orangutan. The amoeba is somewhat less than the worm and so on. Right down to plants.

And then you make a big jump down to inanimate matter. And if there is any such thing, if it even means anything, we might even say unformed matter, matter in the process of being organized. Gross stuff, if you will.

In the technical sense of gross, all right? Now, stick with me. If the devil exists, and we're assuming he does on the basis of Scripture, where would you put them in the list?

I think most people, until they stop and think about it, would put them down here. As far away from God as they could get. Picturing Him as an opposite.

Right? But if what we're doing is ranking creatures, we're ranking the created order in terms of how much it approximates unto God Himself, You would have to put him here. The highest of all created beings.

The highest archangel. We get just some hints of this in scripture and we don't have the time tonight to go through it. But the biblical picture is that God created Lucifer, the light bearer, as his vice regent.

So close to God that you would easily mistake him for God himself. And that Lucifer's problem, as a matter of fact, was pride. saying, who needs God?

I'm so close, I might as well be him. Now, my point is, that vividly demonstrates to us that the most evil and the most good are not equal opposites. They're very close alike.

What makes Lucifer, what makes Satan such an arch enemy of God is that he so closely approximates him but misuses it. It's good gone wrong. That's terribly important.

That runs all the way through our thinking. We've illustrated it by reference to Satan, but the same thing would be true of mankind. We dare to say that we are the highest of the animal world.

In fact, most of us would say there's a radical distinction. Physically, we're like other animals, and yet we're different from any other animal. And believers say that our difference is that not in terms of our shape, but that our spirit is created in the image of God.

We're made like Him. That's good. Right?

God created man and said, Behold, it is very good. The more like God we are, the greater the possibility of misusing great good for great evil. Now that's a real dilemma.

If you've admitted that free choice is a necessity for goodness to mean anything. And now you've said that the highest of, whatever we mean by the highest of the creatures is that we have a greater approximation to God. That also means a greater propensity for misusing the free choice.

Or, put it another way, the greater the potential for good of necessity, the greater the potential for evil. Okay? The greater the potential for good, the greater the potential for evil.

think of you know a very limited person a mongoloid child a person who's been in an automobile accident and is virtually a vegetable alright I mean there might even be medically speaking human beings whose personality and mentality have been so destroyed that doctors would say they're just a vegetable they have no significant capacity for evil they have no significant capacity for good. The two go hand in hand. Third, God's purposes, now I'm moving on to distinctly biblical ground, the God of the scriptures, God's purposes, are not frustrated by evil.

When we set up the dilemma and talk about God is all powerful, all knowing and all good and yet evil exists, immediately we have to add an amendment that though evil exists and though it is really evil, God's ultimate purposes are not frustrated by it. That's the wonder of His sovereignty as portrayed in the scripture. I don't think you could know that simply by sitting down and philosophizing about it.

That is how God has revealed Himself to us is that I am the sort of God who brings good out of evil, who brings light out of darkness. I am a redeeming God. Now, in other words, there are two things that we must not say.

We must not say that evil is itself good. That evil is good. We must not say that.

It is really evil. All right? But having said that, we must not say that God's purposes are evil because God will wrench goodness out of evil.

For the Christian, obviously, the most vivid and overwhelming example of that is the cross itself. The greatest miscarriage of justice, the greatest abuse of men's freedom was in nailing Jesus to a cross. The one perfectly innocent, perfectly righteous man in all history.

That was horrendous evil. That was the blackest spot on the ledger of mankind. And yet, God wrenched out of that the greatest good in the history of the world.

He turned it into our redemption. But on a much less dramatic level, I think most of us could witness to that being true in our own lives as well. A given event may be in and of itself a bad thing.

And we mustn't say it's a good thing. It was a bad thing. And yet as we turn to God in the midst of our need and our helplessness and our dismay and perhaps our pain and suffering or our bereavement or whatever it was, we found Him turning it into good.

Can anybody testify to that in your own life? that a severe disappointment a setback an illness showed you something led you to an insight brought a change in your character rearranged your priorities and out of a bad thing you said there was blessing there Joseph you remember the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors and his brothers who hated him because he was a young upstart and they sold him into slavery in Egypt and years later after being thrown into prison miraculously God allows him to become the vice regent under Pharaoh overseeing the whole work of Egypt and ultimately providing grain supplies for the whole fertile crescent and the land of Canaan itself. Do you remember the story?

And at the end of the book of Genesis finally Joseph's brothers years later come in and they have to face him and they don't recognize him and when he finally reveals himself to them they're horrified they're sure he's going to kill them for what they did to him and his comment in Genesis 50 verse 20 is you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. That's the sort of God we have. Paul in Philippians says, I want you to know, my brothers, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.

What happened to him? He was clapped into prison. House arrest in the city of Rome.

And out of that, countless Roman soldiers became Christians. The witness of his imprisonment reached right into Caesar's household. The whole city of Rome was turned on its ears.

Christians who had been holding back were suddenly emboldened by virtue of his example. He says, I want you to know that what has happened to me has served to advance the gospel. It was bad that he was thrown into prison.

And yet God turned it into good. Some of you may have heard me speaking a while ago, I think it was on Thanksgiving, about the fact that we can now document that the first evangelization of the Midland countries of what we now call England was by Christian soldiers under the employment of Rome who were converted in contact with Paul in his imprisonment. Out of his imprisonment, all he could do is write a few letters.

Okay, that's the third thing, that God's purposes are not frustrated. An event may be evil. And we mustn't say it's good if it's evil.

If God says it's evil, it's evil. But God's purpose in allowing it is a good purpose. That's the balance.

Fourth statement is this. Again, from a distinctly biblical point of view, we take by faith that evil will not go on forever. That evil will not go on forever.

And probably the major single hang-up with the whole philosophical discussion is that we approach it with a this-worldly point of view, and what we need is an eternal perspective. Paul wrote to the Romans in chapter 8. He made this comment, verse 18.

He said, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing. now think of that the sufferings in the plural add up all the suffering of all the people in all the world in all time add it all up whatever that comes to and Paul has the audacity to say I consider that the sufferings of this present age aren't even worth comparing with the glory and if you have the RSV it says the glory that is to be revealed to us but that can also be translated even more powerfully with the glory that's to be revealed in us now he's speaking as a Christian to Christians and I said that's by faith that we see that God is going to swallow up pain and suffering and evil in an overwhelming victory and however long and awful it may seem to you to endure it here and now it's just a flash compared to eternity beyond which again the biblical picture is that there is a devil his purposes are evil he wants to afflict us in many many ways but God has sovereignty over how far Satan can go that's very clearly portrayed in the book of Job Satan keeps coming and saying can I do this and God says this but not that he can go this far but not any farther and it's a very interesting thing you might read your way through the book of Job as an example of all of this. Because Job starts out with great self-righteousness and at the end of his sufferings comes to a point of a whole new revelation of his need of God and his need for forgiveness.

1 Corinthians chapter 10 One of the most important promises in the New Testament and one that I would really urge you to memorize and really hang on to. 1 Corinthians 10 and verse 13. I'm going to jump right in the middle of the verse where the sentence begins.

It says, God is faithful and He will not let you be tempted beyond your strength. But with the temptation will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. so God will limit how far Satan can go in anybody's life but however far he goes God's promise is that he has resources available to you if you'll turn to him and avail yourself of his grace that you can cope now that sheds an awful lot of light on the subject I'm sure you've said or heard people say somebody's going through some ghastly situation and you've said you've heard somebody say, I don't know how he does it.

I couldn't do it. Right? No, you couldn't do it.

Unless God called you to do it, in which case his promise is that he will give you the strength to cope. He will not allow you to be stretched to the breaking point. You'll be stretched a whole lot farther than you ever thought you could be, but not to the breaking point if you turn to him in the midst of that situation.

The book of Revelation ends, the last two chapters of the Bible end with a glorious vision in which death, pain, suffering, sorrow, crying is swallowed up in victory. And so we have to say again, evil will not go on forever. God allows it because it seems to be the corollary of choice.

He will use it for his own purposes, which is not to say that it's a good thing. It is still evil, and yet he'll bring good out of it if we turn to him in the midst of the situation. He will not allow it to break us if we turn to him.

But the final answer is it won't go on forever. In fact, all of human experience, all of human history is just a moment from the perspective of eternity. And Paul says, I consider that all of it isn't even worth comparing, not even worth talking about, not even worth remembering.

Okay? Okay? I hope you have a 90-minute on this.

Problem of pain, specifically. Again, four concepts I'll try to be quicker. First, pain, suffering, sickness, death, the whole schmear, is part of the consequence of the fall.

Now, what we mustn't say is that any given experience of suffering is a product of a given sin. That was a mistake that many of the Jews in the Old Testament made, and that's one of the reasons that the book of Job is in the Old Testament, is to correct that. It's not that God is doling out this sickness for this sin, this bereavement for that error, but that the whole created order is infected because of the fall.

The concept, biblically, is one of federal headship. We were given dominion over the world. As we blew it, the whole world, the whole created order, was somehow affected in the fall.

The whole created order has become subject to pain, to suffering, to death. In other words, we've brought that on ourselves as a race. You mustn't say, because this man is born blind, he sinned or his parents sinned.

Jesus addressed that very question. That's not a one-for-one relationship. But his blindness, the fact of blindness, is a byproduct of a fallen order.

Again, Romans 8 speaks to the issue. And Paul says this. He says in verse 19, The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of him who subjected it in hope. Again, that's not the end of the story. Because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.

As goes the president, so goes the government. Okay? As goes the father, so goes the family.

Okay? Not completely, but by and large. As goes the human race, so goes the world over which we were set.

in a position of dominion. It's interesting to me to note that so much of human suffering is in fact directly traceable to human avarice or greed. I mean, it's pain that we inflict on each other.

Not all of it, surely, but so much of it. I mean, the millions who are now starving, we could do something about that. There doesn't have to be anybody on the face of the earth starving tonight.

And yet millions are starving right now. Whose fault is that? Is that God's fault?

But even natural evil, things not directly the product of human choices, but things like earthquakes and tornadoes and stuff like that, are part of a corruption of the natural order that is traceable to a fallen world. Two, there isn't any such thing as cumulative pain. that's an important consideration Lewis makes this point in I think the ninth chapter of his book I don't know if you've ever thought about that we are horrified most of us the thing that makes the problem of pain and suffering such a ghastly problem for the goodness of God is that it's not that my finger hurts but that it's my finger and your finger and all of the fingers in all of the world in all time and all of the people who have ever suffered and all of the Jews who were massacred under Hitler and all of the Christians who were massacred under Stalin and all of it rolled up into one.

And it's the enormity of the pain and suffering that seems such a blot against the character of God. But the truth of the matter is, you can't do that. There isn't any such thing as cumulative pain.

Nobody is now or has ever suffered all of that accumulation. there are only individual pains and we've already said that God has promised sufficient grace and strength for anyone who is suffering to cope with it so you can't add it up there isn't anybody who has ever suffered all of that there are only individual pains thirdly terribly important that we recognize that pain itself is not necessarily bad. There's several things I want to say about this quickly.

One of the major functions of pain is to warn us against a greater danger. My little daughter who's crawling around on the floor and starts to play with the electric cord. What do I do?

I slap her hand. I inflict pain on purpose to warn her because I can't sit her down at age six months or nine months and have a philosophical discussion about the nature of electricity. Right?

And what she might do to herself. So I inflict some pain to warn her. You stick your finger into a burning fire and it's going to hurt.

And that warns you, get your hand out of there, right? Now, is that bad that it hurt you? In and of itself, it's not bad.

In fact, it would be fairly hard to imagine a world in which we could operate without some sort of warning signals. Secondly, there is some pain, at least, that should be, I think most moral men and women would insist some pain should be inflicted from time to time for certain things as a way of punishment not just a warning but as retribution something in us rises up and saying that should be punished that deserves punishment we are physical creatures and physical punishment means pain is that bad? but beyond all of that it strikes me that much of the pain that we experience is again a kind of a necessary corollary of living in a world in which there are fixed realities.

Put it to you this way. That if I can use bricks to build a church, they need to have certain properties to them. And when I'm doing a good thing with those bricks, we appreciate those qualities.

But supposing I take some of those same bricks and bash Paul over the head with them. What sort of a world would it be if you insisted that every time I wanted to do something malevolent, something evil with those bricks, they turned into feathers? Do you see that we're sliding right back into that very first dilemma that I was trying to outline?

You could perhaps imagine a world in which every time any person that ever wanted to do something evil to somebody else or ever wanted to inflict pain, God would change the bricks into feathers. but pretty quickly that stops being a real world pretty quickly choices stop meaning anything pretty soon you don't have people you have robots and the very thing you were trying to protect which was goodness you've lost because goodness has no meaning unless it's choice and your choices don't mean anything unless they lead to consequences again I'm right back to the very beginning I'm not sure I can imagine that sort of a world That probably finally becomes a self-contradiction. And even God can't do a self-contradiction.

Finally, I think it's terribly important that we recognize that pain can have, above and beyond everything else that I've said thus far, pain in and of itself undeserved unwarranted pain can have a redemptive influence if we'll allow it beyond being a warning beyond being a punishment beyond being my just deserts I am being abused maybe it's moral evil that somebody is inflicting on me or maybe it's natural evil that I'm suffering with illness or whatever it might be We know, every one of you knows instances in which it's had redemptive qualities in people's lives. I think of my own father, who was a long-term sufferer with multiple sclerosis, which was attended by many complicating factors. It usually is not a painful disease.

In his case, it was excruciatingly painful for the last 15 years of his life. And our family went through the experience of seeing him reduced to a helpless cripple. And finally succumbing to pneumonia, which is usually the way MS patients go.

And shortly before he died, my father said this to me. He said, I pray every day that God would heal my body. I wish he would.

But the result of this illness is that I have come to trust Christ for my eternal salvation. And it's been worth it. I don't have the time to tell you the whole story.

My father was a strong, self-reliant, you know, New England self-made man type. And a very good man. But out of that kind of self-reliance, he didn't need God.

Who needs God? Until he found he needed God. He needed other people.

He became helpless. It was pitiful. It was not pretty.

But out of his helplessness, he discovered the most important thing in all life. Now, would I trade his eternal salvation for 15 years of good health? He wouldn't, and neither would I. I met a woman in a nursing home a number of years ago.

She was reduced to a little tiny cubicle. That was her world. She had lived there for about 20 years.

She had psoriasis. She was arthritic, hopelessly crippled. She lived on $10 a month.

And she tithed that to me. I was working among students in New England. They sent me to see her because they said, you go see Addie Warram.

She knows how to pray. And when she found out about the work, she not only agreed to pray every day, but she took one of her $10 a month and sent it to my support. Talk about the widow's mite.

I never spent a dollar so carefully as that dollar of hers. But the thing I share with you is this. The first time I walked into that room and I was appalled at the circumstances, I looked at her and she was absolutely radiant.

And I said, how can you be so joyful? She had lost her husband and her only son 20 years before. Here she was.

How can you be so joyful? And she said, when I lost everything else, I discovered that God himself was sufficient for my needs. Pain can have in and of itself a redemptive quality to it.

Now it doesn't always but whose fault is that? If God can use it in our lives as we turn to him for his grace if he is prepared to use it for good but we fail to turn to him instead we shake our fist in his face in anger whose fault is it? one thing we must never say must never say is why me?

you know, this is more than I deserve we're dealing with a holy God what I deserve is hell if I ever have one moment of pleasure it's not because I earned it it's because he was gracious enough to give it to me don't ever ask for justice don't ever say why me why not you if God didn't spare his only son scripture says why not you the issue is not what am I going to do with this terrible pain but how am I going to allow God to change this into an experience of victory as I turn to Him. It's important that we believe on the basis of the New Testament that God wants to heal people. It's really important that we claim that by faith.

I think that we could demonstrate that if we took the time. Jesus never once refused somebody who asked Him for healing. Never once.

In fact, He went out of His way to heal in a number of instances where He wasn't. Sought out. Okay? You cannot mount a case, it seems to me, on the basis of Scripture, that God wills our pain and suffering.

He doesn't. God wills that we be whole and our prayers ought to be in that direction for each other and even for ourselves. And I believe you want my wholeness. But saying God wants it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen.

God also wants my goodness. That doesn't mean I'm always going to be good. God wants all men to go to heaven.

That doesn't mean all men are going to go to heaven. there are other factors and if pain and suffering if for instance you know we are hell bent to poison ourselves to death with the additives we are putting in our food if that's the way it is and we know better but we go on doing it are we going to blame God you know when we begin to succumb to that God's will is that we be healthy but he also tells us what to do with our food and we pay very little attention to that okay The fact that God wills our wholeness does not necessarily mean that every prayer for healing is going to be immediately answered. Okay?

Our confidence is that's plan A. God has a plan B. And that is when healing doesn't immediately come, He's the sort of God who can turn even illness, even pain, even suffering, even bereavement into victory if we'll allow Him to do so. So let me close with this. I said I wasn't going to speak very pastorally, but in the last two minutes, when you are faced with it, I think there are at least three questions to ask yourself.

One, have I brought this on myself? Have I brought it on myself? Some of you know what the Surgeon General has demonstrated about nicotine.

And I will visit you one day in a cancer ward and you will be dying. Please don't blame God. Have I brought this on myself?

There may be indirect ways in which I bring things upon myself. most of the financial grief in which we find ourselves is because we really have never taken seriously what God has said about finances. But we've been operating on a Wall Street mentality.

Most of the problems in our marriages and our families and with our kids and with our parents are because we've never tried to put into practice what God says about relationships. Have I brought this upon myself? That's the first question.

Two, can I learn anything? from this experience? Whether I've brought it on myself or I am the, quote, innocent victim.

Whether or not, either way. Can I learn anything from this? It may be that I am, relatively speaking, humanly speaking, I am the innocent victim of this circumstance.

But God would teach me some things for myself, for the future, or for others. Would I be willing to go through it that I might be a blessing to somebody else? a few years down the road.

You know, what I've found is that people who have gone through the bust-up of marriages and the innocent victims, quote-unquote again, tend to be the folks who have the most to share with people who are in the midst of marital grief. Even the ones who have brought it on themselves who were the guilty party to a marital breakup. They've gone through it and they've learned something and they have something to minister to others.

Is there anything here in the midst of this ghastly situation that I can learn from this experience. What does God want to teach me? Regardless of why it came upon me, what is God trying to say to me?

A buddy of mine went through his wife's second adulterous affair. And everybody ran to him and supported him. Poor you, poor you, poor you.

And finally, one guy had the guts to say, what is God saying to you about your shortcoming? And all the rest of us somehow miss that. And thirdly, is there anything here for which I can thank God?

As awful as it may be, as painful as it may be, is there anything here for which I can thank God? And I'll bet that if you're willing to be thankful in all things, God will show you, he'll begin to show you some things that will ameliorate that. You begin to catch a glimpse of His creative, redemptive purpose.

You may not see it. You may not see it all. You may not see it immediately.

But here's where faith begins to be operative. I believe that my Father in Heaven is a good Father. And His purposes are good.

And as I continue to trust Him, rather than rebelling against it and getting angry, He will turn it into good, either in my experience or in somebody else's. I close then with a little poem, an anonymous poem. Some of you have heard this before. It's called The Weaver.

My life is but a weaving between my God and me. I do not choose the colors. He worketh steadily.

Oft times he weaveth sorrow. And I, in foolish pride, forget he sees the upper and I the underside. Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why.

The dark threads are as needful in the skillful weaver's hand as the threads of gold and silver in the pattern he has planned. let's bow our heads again Father we've covered a great deal of territory in so brief a time help us to begin to see things as you see them Your word says that your thoughts are not our thoughts. Your ways are not our ways.

Your perspective is altogether different. We're like those who see the back or the underside of a tapestry, all the tangled threads and knots, the chaos of it. If we could just come around and see it from the pattern side, we'd see the beautiful thing that you are creating.

if we could just see it from the perspective of eternity if we could just see what you are trying to accomplish in our lives by the things that you allow to come into them rather than complaining we would stand and applaud we would give you glory we would thank you for the wonder of your goodness to us we do pray father for those who may right now be suffering physical pain or broken relationships or confusion of mind and heart, we pray that in the light of your word and your promise, they'd be encouraged to turn more daringly to trust you, to find your grace sufficient for their every need. We recognize that finally, neither this nor any of the other questions we've concerned ourselves with are really intellectual issues at all. But they're a matter for trust and faith in you.

Help us to see you as you've revealed yourself in the Lord Jesus. Amen.