Pilgrim No.4 The Problem of Suffering

And we turn to what is a very glorious chapter, the eighth chapter. Now this is rather a lengthy passage of scripture, and so we will not read it all this evening. We'll commence at verse 18, and perhaps before you retire this evening, you'd like to read the first 17 verses on your own.

However, we're commencing, as I say, at the 18th verse, and it's Romans chapter 8. This is the testimony of the Apostle Paul then. I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.

For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to wit the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought. But the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

What shall we say then? What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Now we come to what I think is one of the most difficult subjects to deal with this evening, one of the most grave of problems that confronts anyone who is a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ, and I refer to the problem of suffering.

And let me say that what I have to bring before you this evening does not in any sense claim to be a solution to this problem, but rather what I want to do is to share with you my own understanding of what Scripture has to say on this subject. And as I address you, I address you from my own heart. For faith is not always something that comes easy to a preacher, and there are times when a pastor in particular who has to deal with many distressing experiences that other folk have, and perhaps sometimes he has too.

There are times when his faith is tested, and he has to relate his experience of life to what he believes to be the revelation of God in the Bible. So I minister to you God willing, not in any sense academically, but from my heart, confessing that this is an area where I'm still a learner, sitting at the feet of Jesus, asking Him day by day to show me more of His will and to grant me a greater understanding of His plan. It's not my intention to keep specifically close to the notes that I've handed you this evening, though the the gist of what I have to say is encompassed therein, but they will serve, I think, to remind you of our study if you'd like to turn to them on later occasions.

One of the things that always impresses me about the biblical writers is their honesty. The people who were used by God to compile this book, which I believe to be inspired, from time to time express their own difficulties in comprehending, in understanding the overall plan and purpose of God, and nowhere is this more evident than in the book that we call the Psalms. We praise God that we have for us to make reference to these days this book where the psalmist, from time to time, confesses that he's got great problems in understanding why certain things have happened, one to his nation and two to himself.

Now it's a good thing when you have got doubts to express them, and this is precisely what the psalmist does. I give you, for example, and there are a myriad that could be selected, the 44th Psalm, and there the writer confesses he cannot understand God's treatment of his nation Israel. The Jewish people were in a special relationship to the Lord, and yet at a time of need it seems as though God does not vindicate his own people, and the psalmist, quite frankly, doesn't understand it.

And he says so in the 15th verse of Psalm 44, my confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face hath covered me. He goes on to develop this theme in the 17th verse, all this has come upon us, all our difficulties, all our problems as a nation, yet he's as bold as to say this, have we not forgotten thee? Neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant. Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from thy way.

And his boldness seems to know no bounds at all, because in the 23rd verse he suggests that God should wake up to the situation. Awake thou, awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, cast us not off forever. Well, I say there is an illustration from the Psalms of a man who does not understand God's dealings with his own nation, the Jews, and this problem is expressed in a more personal fashion in the 73rd Psalm.

Here, the writer can't understand why God deals with him as an individual in the fashion that he does, and he contrasts the way that certain evil people seem to get through life unhurt, uninjured, and yet he himself has known great difficulties and problems. In fact, the opening verses of this Psalm seem to suggest that evil and those who agree to an evil philosophy of life pays great dividends, it brings rich rewards. The psalmist tells us in the third verse that he's envious of the people who have lived in an ungodly fashion.

In the fourth verse, he makes reference to the health that some of these people seem to enjoy, and it just doesn't seem fair. In the sixth verse, he recognizes the satisfaction that they have. In the eighth verse, he speaks about their smugness, and in the twelfth verse, he speaks about the cash that they receive, about the money that is theirs, and he goes on to say that they're not stricken like other men.

Lord, you're not really fair in your dealings, not fair in your dealings with the likes of me. I've tried to live a clean and a godly life, and yet I find that those who do not live in the way that I endeavor to live my life are better off than I am. Well, I say we thank God for such frank statements of difficulties as is discovered within the book of Psalms, and the problems that confronted those men in yesteryear are still the problems that confront us today, and that's perhaps one of the reasons why Christian people so often go to the book of Psalms, because we can enter into the experience of the man concerned, and we can say, yes, that's right, you tell the Lord all about it, because that's precisely the way that I feel.

Well, why does God allow certain injustices in our world? Why does God allow so much suffering? I say that anyone who is a thinking individual must have this problem at the forefront of their mind, at least on some occasions. We're faced daily in our newspapers with pictures of people who suffered, of people who are hungry. Our minds are full of photographs of the effects of the war in Indochina, and now and again we ask ourselves, well why, if God is God, if He's a God of love and mercy, why doesn't He just step out of His heaven and do something about it? Why doesn't He manifest His power and His glory on this earth at the moment? So we try to find some answer to this perennial problem, and we recognize, as C.S. Lewis points out in his book, The Problem of Pain, that a lot of the suffering that there is in our world today is traceable to man.

He is responsible for it. As Professor Lewis said, when souls become wicked, then certainly they will use this possibility to hurt one another, and this perhaps accounts for four-fifths of the suffering of men. It is man and not God that has produced racks and whips and slavery and prisons and guns and bayonets, and it's by human avarice we have poverty.

And yes, we find a certain amount of help by C.S. Lewis's observation here, but we have to also agree with him that there are certain other aspects of suffering that cannot be directly attributed to man. And Dr. Lewis goes on to say, there remains nonetheless much suffering which cannot be attributed to ourselves. Perhaps it's that suffering in particular that is a problem to the Christian.

There's a book written by a man called Miller, W. Miller, The God That I Want, and he forcefully expresses our predicament when he says, what holy chastening is intended when babies are born deformed in mind or body? Is it God's will that two-thirds of our population, of the world's population, are undernourished? Any hospital will show a gallery of pain which is almost unbearable to the viewers. And Miller goes on, if there is a God, he is responsible. Well, I say that's expressing the problem in its most dramatic and in its most forceful fashion.

What are we to say to this as Christian people? Well, let me branch off for a moment and introduce two concepts that I didn't have the room to include in the notes that I've printed for you tonight. Let me talk to you a moment about what I would call Christian agnosticism. I remember taking a mission at a university not so long ago, and I interviewed and spoke to dozens and dozens of students, sometimes as a group and sometimes as individuals.

And I do recall one very educated fellow saying to me, you're a Christian minister, an evangelical, you've got all the answers. Let's hear what you have to say. And before I spoke another word, I disarmed him of his presuppositions.

I said, my friend, you're dead wrong. I haven't got all the answers. I've got, I believe from the Bible, some of the answers to the problems that confront men and women, but I haven't got all the answers, and you're wrong if you think that Christians claim to be able to solve all the problems, because the Bible, which we believe to be God's revelation to mankind, does not claim to tie everything up in a very neat parcel.

There are rugged ends. Indeed, we have it on record, the experience of one of the earliest Christians, that God has revealed Himself in certain instances of human life as through a glass darkly, and we don't understand, not clearly, but we dare to believe that one day we shall understand. So I say there is an area that I'm quite prepared to confess where I am an agnostic.

Not that I don't believe that God is in a certain situation, but I don't understand how God is working His plan and His purpose out, and I think I have a right to make such a confession. The Bible tells me that God's ways are not my ways, and His thoughts are not my thoughts, and if I could understand God, then I will be God myself. It was Martin Luther who referred to the hidden God.

God has revealed part of Himself, but the whole of His purposes have not been revealed, but some have. So then, this topic of Christian agnosticism impinges, is directly related to the study of this particular problem, the problem of suffering. And another topic that I'd like to introduce at this stage is what I would call the unacceptable answer, indeed the unacceptable approach of those who have no religious faith at all.

I was reading a book only this last week, written by a Christian, but it was a commentary on the way that the theory of Darwin had been applied politically and socially in our world today. The theory of Darwin was taken up by Karl Marx, who incidentally wanted to dedicate his book Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, but Darwin wouldn't have any of it. But this theory of the world and living phenomena as we know it, being produced through an evolutionary process, having at its root cause a fluke, is to me totally and completely unacceptable.

I would claim that the atheist position requires more faith to undergird it than does the Christian position. For me to believe that the whole of this world, the whole of the universe has come about through fluke, I say is unacceptable. And though there are problems that I will freely confess from the Christian point of view when we're dealing with particularly the issue of suffering, I would argue that the person who claims not to be a theist, not to believe in God, has far greater problems along this line than you or I do.

Well, perhaps I'll come back to that if there's time towards the end of our study this evening. But let me try to show you the lines in which I think we should approach this problem from the Word of God. The avenues along which we should move as we search around for some answer.

And I think the Word of God does give us some insight at any rate into our method of approach. And the first thing that I want to put before you, and I've got several propositions that I want to think through with you this evening which don't actually tie up, not altogether with the notes that you have, but the first of my propositions is this, that when anyone is to approach God, humility must characterize that person. When anyone is to approach God, humility must characterize the person.

You see, God is far greater than I am, far greater than you are. One of the great problems of theologians, one of the irresolvable problems of philosophers is to define God, because any definition that you make is totally inadequate. So for me, as a puny finite creature with all my intellectual failings and defects, for me to think that I can grasp anything with regard to the knowledge of God in its fullness at any rate is to trade in absurdities.

God is far bigger than you or me. So the man who is going to approach God must have humility in his character as he enters into his presence. Indeed, we're told in Scripture that God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.

So in my approach to God, I am quite prepared to concede that there are things that are logical to him that may be illogical to me, that he sees not just the present, but also the past and the future, and yet I am tied to the one dimension of the present, and perchance if I could see as he sees, then I would understand more about this world that is a problem, that is a problem to me than I do at the moment. So I say humility must characterize our approach to God, and developing this theme a little further, developing my proposition, I would say this, that it is not committing intellectual suicide to trust God about things that you don't fully understand. A little child trusts his father.

He's got no logical reason to trust his father, but invariably he does. I can recall the Second World War, though I was only a young lad at the time, but I can recall certain things that my mother and father told me and my brother to do when the city where I was brought up was under attack. And I didn't question, I did it.

I went out to the air raid shelter. I ensured that what my father told me to do, I put into practice, though I didn't quite understand sometimes what he had to say. Let me give you another illustration, perhaps humorous, along the same line.

I remember one day when my brother David managed to get tonsillitis, and he had a pretty bad dose. And my mother thought that she ought to take him off to the hospital, so she did, and he had to have his tonsils out, I think that's the expression. And when he came back, they kept him in hospital a couple of days.

When he came out, oh he was most indignant about my mother. He pointed to her in front of my dad, and he wouldn't speak to her, but he spoke to my dad about her, and he said, she let the doctor cut my throat. She let the doctor cut my throat.

I still remember it. And of course he didn't understand that what she had done was for his good. He needed to have his tonsils out, or else his condition would have been, would have got increasingly grave, and he would have been very ill indeed.

And of course, looking back on the occasion, he fully understands that my mother was vindicated in, in taking him, justified in taking him to the hospital. Now I say, as children, there are times when we trust our parents, because we know them. And we have a basis on which we build our edifice of trust.

And you and I have a right to trust our God. We have a basis, a basis I say, that is far greater than that of the patriarch Abraham, who had faith enough to believe that the God of all the earth would do right. What is our basis? Well, Jesus Christ.

You see, you cannot divorce Jesus Christ from the problem of suffering. God has revealed what He is like in and through the Lord Jesus. And the God who has demonstrated His love towards me in such a personal fashion is a God, I believe, in whom I can place my trust when I cannot fully understand His purposes in certain areas of this phenomenon that we called life.

So my first proposition was this, that humility must characterize our approach to God as we moot through the, the problem of, of suffering. But let me make another observation. And again, I deduce this from Scripture.

I can't bring you to any one particular passage this evening, because I'm having to dart here and there throughout the book. But my second observation will be this, that man and his habitat, man and the place in which he lives, is affected by sin. Man's rebellion against God has adversely affected him.

Adam was warned, in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And when Adam disobeyed God, he and Eve suffered the consequences of their sinfulness. And the consequences of that act of rebellion are still with us today.

And you can't accuse God of being unfair, because the Bible says that in the Jacobean English of the A.V., that in the similitude of Adam's transgression, so you and I have sinned. And if you work that out in modern English, it means that you've done exactly the same as Adam has done. In principle, you have rebelled against God.

And sin affects men and women. It affects them physically, it affects them spiritually. And although we cannot always make a direct link between a particular sickness and a specific sin, nonetheless the Bible indicates that the root of all sickness in our world is traced back to sin.

Let me repeat that, because I wouldn't like anyone to be hurt by what I've said this evening, because sickness is something that is very much a present factor in the lives of many of our people, and particularly here in Worthing. I'm saying this, that ultimately sickness and sin are related, but I'm not saying that there is a direct relationship between a physical condition, a physical illness that you and I might have, and the sin that we have committed. You must work this out for yourself by looking up the references I've given you in the notes where our Lord gives, where we find two specific examples in the ministry of our Savior, where sickness was directly attributed to sin on the part of the one who was sick, and sickness, and sin was denied to be the cause of the sickness on the part of another.

So in a general fashion, we must say that man's physical condition, the sickness that he has to endure, is caused originally by his sin. And then the Bible goes on to teach something else which is very unpleasant, at least very unpleasant to modern man. He tends to react in righteous indignation about this, but nonetheless the Word of God puts this teaching forward quite plainly.

Not only is man affected by his sinfulness, but the habitat of man, the place where man lives, is affected by his sinfulness. Adam is told that by the sweat of his brow he will earn his living. And it would appear from those, from the verses in Genesis 3 that the world in which Adam lives is polluted because of the sinfulness of our first father.

In Romans chapter 8, the reason why I read to you from the halfway through the chapter and onwards, accords with this implicit teaching in Genesis 3. The whole of our world is in bondage, says the Apostle Paul. It groans for its emancipation. It groans for the shackles of sin that bind it to be to be broken.

And that's a thought that's very, very difficult really to understand, until you think about earthquakes, until you think about what we call acts of God or natural disasters, floods and what-have-you. Here is some evidence of sin in the world of nature manifesting itself in an ugly fashion comparable to the sin that manifests itself in the lives of people like you and me. I say that 20th century man who has come of age, man who feels that he can produce his own religion, dethrone God and deify himself, reacts against this teaching.

And yet, you know, one would be more disposed to have respect for the righteous indignation of some if man in the 20th century would preserve his habitat today. Because the very way in which we pollute our world, it seems to me, underlines what Scripture teaches, alright, in an unpalatable fashion, that sin has ruined our habitat. When I hear people getting uptight about this particular Scripture, I wonder to myself how uptight they get about the way particularly this Western civilization of ours is contributing to the ruination of our world.

Do you listen to the news yesterday how the Scandinavian ship, I think it was from Sweden but I'm not too sure, that wanted to discharge a cargo of acid has had to return back to its base because there was such an outcry that the oceans are getting so polluted these days. And so the boat is able, the ship's enabled to be placed in a berth for a year and then there's a problem, well it will come up again in a year's time. And I could spend a great deal of the moments that are at my disposal this evening by giving you instance after instance of the way that man in the 20th century, man the scientist, man come of age, is ruining the very world which God gave to him.

Underlining all the time the fact that his sinfulness has affected his habitat. So then my second proposition this evening was that sin affects man and affects his world. The third one that I bring to your attention is that God is not outside this scene of suffering.

God is not outside the scene of suffering. There are some philosophers and indeed some religions who would reckon that God is tucked away, is a god of a deist, he's removed from this world. It's as though a watchmaker constructed a watch and then let the watch get on with itself and the watchmaker is obviously away from the watch.

Now I say that this may be the approach that some people have to the doctrine of God, but it's not the approach that the Bible teaches. The Bible doesn't say that God is way up there, sitting somewhere in the skies, divorced from the affairs of men and women. No, there is in Scripture the doctrine of the imminence of God, that God is the present reality.

A lovely verse from the Psalms that I quote on many occasions because it's a favorite of mine. God is a very present help in times of trouble. God, because his nature is not like ours, is a being who can circumnavigate the globe and he is present in the affairs of men and women today, not outside the scene of suffering, but present in it.

And God speaks to men and women today, I think, in his sovereignty through the very suffering for which man essentially is responsible. I believe that Scripture teaches us that these disasters that sometimes we witness today or have reports of or see pictures of on our television sets, these disasters are used by God for him to speak to us. How do I deduce that? Well, I give you a couple of references, certainly one reference in your notes to a natural disaster, if you please, in the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The time when a tower fell down and a number of people were crushed and the Lord Jesus makes reference to this tragedy in his ministry, as indeed he does to a number of people who died in Galilee at the hands of the Romans. But when Jesus deals with this problem, he does not approach it philosophically. He doesn't try to show his disciples and those who were listening why it is that these people suffered.

Rather what he says is this, look, here is a calamity and from that calamity you are to note the very flimsy basis on which life is lived. They have a saying in America that the vice-president is a heartbeat from the White House and of course the saying is right. Life is not something that is guaranteed to us.

I mean by that that you can't be guaranteed tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. Your doctor might say you're well, but even doctors have been known to be wrong. There is no guarantee as to your length of lifespan on this earth.

And the Lord Jesus Christ was using these natural disasters, illustrating his teaching from them and underlining the fact that life is a very flimsy thing. And in the next second you and I could be taken into the realm of eternity and have to appear before God and to give an account of the way that we've lived our lives. So through natural disasters I say God speaks to those who have ears to listen, speaks of the flimsiness of life and of the graver disaster of entering into the presence of God as someone whose sins have not been forgiven.

That is a greater disaster than dying from hunger or dying from flood from the cause of flooding. Oh I speak carefully and I'm, God knows, trying to select my words deliberately this evening for I would not have you think that I can in some callous academic fashion deal with these things. They move me as they move you when you see pictures of folks who are suffering.

But I say that beyond the suffering is this voice that is speaking to us through the disaster, through the suffering, the voice of God suggesting to thinking men and women that life itself is on a very flimsy basis, that no one is to presume upon tomorrow, that today we are to ensure that we are in the right relationship with God. Another thing that God, I believe, brings out through suffering, another way that he demonstrates that suffering is not outside his sovereignty, is the way in which precious things, I argue, are discovered in the furnace of suffering. We live in a very materialistic society, particularly in the West, and it's good sometimes when situations occur and we begin to appreciate that materialism and money and wealth and prestige and what-have-you are really worthless tinsels and trinkets that have no abiding value at all.

I was reading this afternoon, and I had a lump in my throat by the time I put the book down, of some letters written by Germans during the, or before the last World War. They were Germans who had refused to succumb to the National Socialist Party and its dictates in Germany, as I said, prior to the last World War. And many of these people had to pay the supreme penalty for defying Hitler.

And one nobleman was writing his last letter to his wife, and I tell you it's very, very moving to read it, and he speaks of how he has begun to realize in prison that many of the things that they used to think of in terms of being valuable, many of the things that they could not have thought of previously of doing without, have absolutely no value at all. I say that it takes suffering sometimes to show us what really is of value, what really is precious in our world. And to see a man or a woman, boys and girls, risking life and limb to come to the help of their fellows with no thought of reward, with no thought of recognition at all, is a precious thing.

And maybe sometimes in suffering, God reveals to us some of the things that we never looked upon as being of value before, and we see them for the first time. And then there is what I would call, having cribbed the term from Richard Wurmbrand, religious anesthesia, that sometimes is present in suffering. And here I deal very carefully with my subject because I realize that they jest at scars who never felt a wound.

But I would say, and I didn't apologize earlier on in our studies for being very personal in some of my illustrations, I would say that I have known some suffering and some distress within my family circle. So I do speak, not academically, but personally. I've known what it's been to see my own father suffer a great deal, and yet I've begun to understand through that something of what Wurmbrand means when he talks about religious anesthesia.

In one of his books, Sermons in Solitary Confinement, Wurmbrand describes how God transformed a prison cell infested with rats into a foretaste of heaven, and it's in this particular chapter as he describes the experience that he uses this term, religious anesthesia. In another book, says Wurmbrand, communists believe that happiness comes from material satisfaction, but alone in my cell, cold, hungry, and in rags, I danced for joy every night. Sometimes I was so filled with joy, I felt I would burst if I did not give it expression.

I had discovered a beauty in Christ I had not known before. As I say, don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to give suffering a texture, a picture that it hasn't got.

I would not personally choose to suffer. I have a yellow streak that runs up and down my spinal cord, and suffering is not something that I naturally find to be attractive, but we have on evidence in the twentieth century and down through the generations illustrations of people who show how God is not outside the scene of suffering, and God in His sovereignty can minister to people who go through experiences that to some of us seem to be intolerable. Let me put up another proposition to you and hasten through the rest of my study at this stage.

The Bible constantly tells us of the passing nature of this life, of the passing nature of this life. You know, Jesus was a remarkable leader. Most leaders who have commanded any popular support have always painted pictures of a tremendous utopia.

You listen to the politicians when an election is pending, listen to what they're going to do, read their manifesto, and utopia heaven, Jerusalem on earth, it's just round the corner. But you don't get this in the teaching of the Lord Jesus. It's very absent from what He has to say.

Let me read you a little bit. He's talking to the disciples, and He says, "...nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places. All these are the beginning of sufferings." Jesus never said that in the scene of time Christian people would, or anyone for that matter, would be absent, would be absolved from suffering.

Indeed, He told us to prepare ourselves for physical and spiritual difficulty, and also He and the rest of the writers underlined the fact that we are here on this earth for a small span of time compared to the whole of eternity, and we are here to prepare for the next world. And this is what the early Christians recognized. It kept them going.

Let me quote from another book, a book written by David Watson. The early Christians knew only too well that if they closed their eyes to the existence of God, to life after death, to heaven and hell, to the justice of God and the vindication of right over wrong, then the world would become one big hurried mess, and they of all men would need to be pitied. This is precisely what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 verse 19, "...if our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in the world." I read to you from a modern translation, "...the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole of the exponents of the New Testament faith tell us to recognize this fact that this world is but a prelude to the next.

It is a period of preparation." Preparation for the time when what? When God will vindicate Himself, when He will show Himself to be just, when He shall demonstrate that the way He has allowed things to develop on this earth is not incompatible with His good and just nature. We are often accused, and Lenin in one of his books was very, very, very, very critical of the Christians on this area of their belief. We're very often accused of preaching pie in the sky when we die.

What did Lenin call it? Religious moonshine that is fed out to the peasants to keep them happy while they work for their taskmasters here on this earth, making the capitalists rich. But let's not get so uptight about Lenin and Marx and all these others who would criticize the Christians that we lose the thrill, the glory that there is in the fact of what lies beyond for you and for me. We're told of our Lord Jesus, and perhaps I can use this as an illustration as to what I'm trying to get at.

We're told by the writer of the Hebrew epistle that the Lord Jesus Christ, for the joy that was before Him, endured the cross and despised the shame for the joy that was before Him. He catapulted Himself, if you like, in His thinking to a period beyond the cross, beyond the day of resurrection, even to that remarkable time that this world has yet to witness when Jesus Christ shall offer His church up to God the Father, and God shall be seen as just by every intelligent created being. I say that we are to keep our eyes fixed on the end purposes of God in this world.

And it was at this point that the psalmist to whom I made reference earlier, whose experience is recorded in the 73rd Psalm, it's at this point that he came to his senses, and he realized that though he couldn't resolve all his problems, nonetheless, there would be a future resolution of the difficulties that confronted him. He speaks in the 17th verse of the 73rd Psalm about going into the sanctuary of God, and then he says, I understood. Understood what? I understood their end.

I understood the end of the righteous, of the unrighteous. I contrasted that with my own end, and I began to realize that God is indeed fair, but God requires time to work out His plan and His purpose. Says the psalmist, thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.

And he concludes his psalm by saying, it is good for me to draw near to God. I have put my trust in the Lord God, that I may declare all thy works. And it's at that point, really, that the Christian has to break off from considering this problem of suffering.