Why Will A Loving God Bring Us Into A World Of Suffering? - 100 Dod - Day 96 by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Problem of Evil — and a Question to Test Your Convictions

The question is this: if God is truly good, why do we live in a fallen world where people go through serial suffering, where some feel their only option is to end their lives? How does the difficulty in the world translate to evidence of God not being good?

Before answering, consider this: if you know the world is wicked — that bringing children into it means they can face all the plethora of concerns, accidents, disease, every kind of vice — why would you still want to have children?

The answer, honestly, is something like: because babies are precious. Because there is a desire for relationship, for family, for fellowship. That answer might not be philosophically airtight, but it is sincere. And that is the very articulation that matters: it is possible to love a people so much that the risk is worth it.

Why God Created Knowing the Fall Would Come

When God created man, did he — in his all-knowing nature — know that man would fall? Yes. Does that mean he didn't think it would still be worth it? No.

You cannot talk about God as though he is some distant administrator who inherited authority and doesn't understand the company from the inside. This is a God who took on flesh, dwelt among us, felt everything being described in the problem of evil, and died a gruesome death — number one, to identify with humanity, and number two, to create an eternal solution to everything that is being listed as the problem.

According to the theological narrative of Scripture, it was man who made death enter into the world. God still stepped in. He didn't send a messenger — he came himself. He offered salvation, died for humanity, paid the eternal price, so that anyone who believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

From a finite perspective that is hard to grasp. But Paul says: Romans 8:18 — "I reckon that the suffering of this present time is not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us." God is telling you there will be an eternal bliss so compensating that looking back, it will still have been worth it.

Free Will Cannot Coexist with a World Where Evil Is Impossible

Consider what the alternative would be. A perfect scenario where evil can never happen — even with free will — is a fantasy. It is a robotic universe. Free will is not possible if good is not possible to reject. Good is not truly good until bad is a possibility.

The mistake many people make even in parenting is thinking the way to ensure children behave rightly is to control all the circumstances. But the real measure of whether children have internalized what they were taught is how they behave outside, in the world, on their own. If you try to control every circumstance, you produce something that looks like compliance but is not character. God gave man genuine free will. It becomes a stretch to then blame him for the choices of wicked and unreasonable men on the earth.

When you see the big picture — the frailty of man that led to the fall, God stepping in regardless, offering salvation, dying, and now waiting — you understand what God was pursuing. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. It is a justice system where not one wickedness will go unpunished. That is the God of the Bible.

On Suicide and the Danger of a Defeat Mentality

There are genuine cases of people who are going through tremendous pain and feel there is no hope. The biblical response — "keep hoping in God" — can feel like a remote and convenient thing to say to someone from the outside.

But from a finite perspective, we almost never actually have the clarity we pretend to have. There was a case of someone with a brain tumor who was told there was no hope. An experimental drug was in its testing phase and dissolved a tumor exactly like his. Had he taken his life in the belief that there was no hope, he would have missed what was already on its way.

The same applies to economic difficulty — things can turn around overnight. For genuine supernatural miracles — they happen in ways that cannot be predicted or explained in advance.

Hope is always a better sermon to preach, because we simply do not have the omniscient clarity required to pronounce that something is permanently hopeless.

Holding to a mentality of defeat does nobody any good. That is not to minimize real pain — it is to insist that the conclusion "there is no way out" is rarely, if ever, one we are actually equipped to make.