Questions No.3 If God is Good, why do people suffer?

When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Look, he said, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.

At this, they covered their ears and yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

Then he fell on his knees and cried out, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. When he had said this, he fell asleep and Saul was there, giving approval to his death. On that day, a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.

Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church, going from house to house. He dragged off men and women and put them in prison.

Amen. Father, there are some who've come into the town this evening because the whole issue of pain and sorrow and suffering and injustice weighs heavily on their heart. We ask that even if the picture is not clarified for them tonight, that at least the promise of an explanation shall be formed as a conviction within their hearts as we all look forward to that great day of the return of Jesus Christ, the moment when we shall stand before you.

And what now we know by faith, we'll know by sight. The day that when, instead of seeing through a glass darkly, we perceive face to face. The day when the hidden things of God shall be revealed and when we shall see the truth of Abraham's great declaration centuries ago shall not the judge of all the earth do right.

Amen. Now I'd be very glad of your concentration this evening. Our subject matter is not simple as in one respect it was this morning and so I'm asking for you to really try to discipline your thoughts so that they don't wonder as I bring you through this subject of how can a good God allow suffering? How can a good God allow suffering? You've probably come across that type of person who says, I would believe in God if it was not for so many evidences to the contrary that I perceive in our world.

If God is a good God, why does the Ganges overflow so much in the delta basin around Bangladesh and so many lives are swept to a watery grave? If God is a good God, then why does he allow babies to starve? Why does he allow malformed children to be born? Why is there so much inequality in our world? Surely if by definition God is omnipotent he should step in and sort it all out. Well that's a mammoth objection that is leveled at the Christian faith and there is no easy way in which we shall face that question and trot out some easy glib answers. In fact we would have to concede as Christian people ourselves or those groping their way towards the Christian faith that there are basic aspects of that fundamental problem that also puzzle us.

We find it difficult to understand why in 1978, as mentioned in the book that I recommended, some 12 missionary members from a hospital, missionary family members from a hospital in Thailand were done to death as their bus overturned. We find it very difficult to understand why it was that William Carey's wife, Carey being the first European missionary to India, should have increasingly become mentally ill and for years plagued Carey as he tried to evangelize, translate the Bible into Indian dialects and also minister to his wife. Why didn't God heal her? Or why didn't God cause Carey at an earlier point in his career to have picked a lady whose mental health was intact and therefore would not prove to be of handicap to her or to them both? Why is it that, to bring things right up to date, that the famous American evangelist who has a healing ministry, R.L. Roberts' son, took a gun and shot his brains out a few weeks ago? I mention not that, not in any way creating a pastoral indiscretion, but having read R.L. Roberts' own comments about the event in a national magazine published in America.

Why do these things happen? You see, even speaking generally as a congregation over against those who will not commit their faith in the living God because of these problems, we admit that there are difficulties indeed. And personally I must confess them. Only the other week I was alarmed to receive news of the death of an Indian brother who riding in a somewhat feeble, frail rickshaw out there in North India was run over by some truck and his face so distorted as a result that his companions could barely recognize him.

I find such things as that hard to understand. I found it very difficult a few years ago when ministering to my own father in the final years of his life, sometimes to pick for he was a relatively small man his unconscious body up from the floor, him having fallen out of bed, and to put him back in bed again. And when he regained some form of consciousness to understand why his body was so wracked with pain, when I tell you that I wept with him and often asked that God would transfer that pain to me, I tell you the truth.

It is said that he laughs at wounds who never felt a scar, and I am not, as a preacher this evening, engaging in some academic exercise. I enjoy an academic argument, but these things are far too real, they're far too dear, they're far too personal to me, and I want to try to show you how from God's Word I try to cope and give you pointers that will help you too. In these past twelve years, as minister of the tabernacle, I have been, if you'll understand me metaphorically, at the scene of a hundred calvaries.

I have witnessed men and women, sometimes young men, sometimes young women, often older friends, cry out, bewildered, sometimes in pain, often frustrated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And there does seem to be at times a forsakenness that is the experience even of the believer, and thus I make that comment. He laughs at wounds who never felt a scar. We're not dealing with something superficial this evening, we're dealing with something that will affect, and probably has affected, most mature people in our congregation, and is in store for some of our young people also.

Well then, how can I approach this subject? I've thought about this for a long time, I've read for hours, I've gone through what I wanted to share with you in my mind during the hours of these past days, but it's only in the final few hours that I've put together some rather scrappy thoughts, and I've tried to pin what I want to say around the incident of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, so that you have some historical incident in your mind to latch on to, and so I don't lose you by just a series of quotations and Bible verses, which are relevant to our subject tonight. Stephen was a great man, and the first thing that I want to say, dealing with the subject of how can God, a good God, allow suffering, is that the death of Stephen, hear me, was a shock to elderly ladies. The death of Stephen was a tragic blow to some elderly ladies.

You say, what do you mean? Why was Stephen first of all mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles? Well, because he had been selected, along with six other colleagues, to take over the responsibility of helping widowed ladies, of bringing sustenance and food to them. In those days, there's no social security service. There is no way of helping some of these poor folk who have lost their husbands, and so the church appoints deacons, and they will take over the responsibility of the apostles and minister to these old ladies.

Can you imagine a conversation between some of these widows, some were Greek and some were Hebrew, in Jerusalem? Stephen is one of those appointed, as they say, as a deacon. What a lovely lad he is. You know, there's something about Stephen that makes your heart go out to him.

I'd just like to think of Stephen as my own son. He's a man who seems to be so spirit-filled. I and another old lady says, and have you heard him preach? I tell you that by the time he gets to the age of the fisherman Peter, he'll be as good as Peter in preaching.

And another comes in, and have you heard Stephen pray? My, when he prays, it seems as though the power of God just flows through his being. And another one says, I've not only heard, I've watched him lay hands on the sick, and I've seen them recover. And another one rushes in from off the streets and says, have you heard the news? Stephen's been arrested.

He's on trial. He's in front of the Sanhedrin. And do you know what he's doing? It's his defense speech.

He's preaching. Aye, that's what we'd reckon Stephen was doing. It's just as we've been saying.

He's a man who's full of potential. There's a lot of eloquence about Stephen. He's really going places.

And then another old lady comes in. Do you know what they're doing to Stephen now? They've taken him outside one of the gates of Jerusalem, and it looks as though they're going to kill him. And eventually another comes in and says to those within, those worried Greek and Hebrew ladies, he's gone.

He's dead. What a tragedy. Here was Stephen, a young fellow, full of potential.

A man who was going to do great things and had already commenced doing great things for God. And yet here he is reported as dead. His body outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Stephen, the first martyr. You know something, my friends, sometimes we read the Acts of the Apostles carelessly. We get so miraculously occupied in picking out the supernatural, we miss the fact that the supernatural was often an uncommon thing in the Acts of the Apostles.

And there's a lot of tragedy. There's a lot of sorrow. There's a lot of persecution.

There's a lot of things which must have been inexplicable to the early Christian followers of our Saviour as they groped towards a fuller understanding of the faith. How could a good God allow this? You see the point? And the point comes back again and again. Couldn't God have stopped it? Couldn't God have stopped all the heat up injury and injustice that there is in our world right to the time of Stephen and beyond? The answer is yes, He could.

He's omnipotent. He's all-powerful. He could have created men as though they were marionettes, puppets on strings, so that when He pulled a string, they jumped.

But what sort of society would that be? How could it ever be said of man that he's in the image of God when he's locked into God like a robot that's been programmed by a computer? The beginning of time, God took a cosmic risk. He gave Adam and Eve free will. And within free will is all the possibility of injury, of sin, of hatred, of hurt.

It was a gigantic step. Some might even have the effrontery to say that God should never have took it. But in His economy, in His will, He did.

And ultimately, He will be proved to have been correct in so doing. But when Adam fell in the garden, the possibility for suffering and pain and injury and death became a grotesque reality. And Adam's sin has infected every human being since that time.

We're not born free. We're born under the slavery of sin. Ah, but you say, why did God have to do it like that? Let me give you an illustration.

Some of you here have actually been to a football match. Now, I guess football is a reasonable sport. At least it's better than fishing or golf.

And there are rules and regulations in football, so I gather. And it's an exciting occupation, or else you wouldn't have thousands going to watch Brighton and Hove down the road there during the football season and worshipping at football shrines throughout our country during the eight months or so football is inflicted upon us. But there are times when people get hurt playing football.

There are times when people have been killed, not many, but there have been times playing that sport. And I dare say it would be possible to eliminate all the dangers from football if you made the rules very exact and if you adjusted the sport and so all risk and all danger had gone. But in eliminating the risk, you'd eliminate the sport and football would be no longer football.

You take a child and Dad gives him a pair of roller skates and he starts to move down the promenade and narrowly misses me one morning as I'm running and then he falls down and he breaks his leg and he hits his head and is concussed. In one sense, Dad's responsible. After all, he gave him the skates.

But there's all the difference in the world that the skates were used and an accident followed and the thought of Dad taking son and bashing his head against the wall and kicking his thigh in. You see the point? In giving freedom, there is an element of risk. But in refusing to give it, then as far as life is concerned, it would have been absolutely meaningless the creative work of God in making Adam centuries and centuries ago.

And when you look at Stephen crumpled on the ground, you can see something of the outworking of the risks that there are in simply being alive on planet Earth. And what is more, the risk of serving the Lord Jesus who said that unless a man was prepared to lay down his life and follow Him if the need came, then he had no right to be His disciple. And the old ladies in Jerusalem would have to come to terms with this, that what had happened was within the sovereignty of God.

Then there is, if I may say, the problem of the stones. They were real stones. And stones, when they're flung at you, they hurt.

Of course, there are those who say that there's no such thing as pain in the world. Some Eastern mystics who reckon that you can get beyond pain and not feel it. Some Christian scientists here in Worthing who say exactly the same.

But I remember that little dog roll. There was a faith healer in Dio who said, although pain is not real, when I sit on a pin and it punctures my skin, I dislike what I fancy I feel. Stones hurt.

And they hurt Stephen. And however thick-skinned you might be as a Christian, you can get hurt, physically so, in the service of the living God. I remember thinking with my interpreter, Chela Jurai, in a village in South India, that unless we made tracks out of that particular village, we'd both of us do a Stephen.

As a crowd of about a hundred reached to get stones to throw at us. There's no necessary immunization policy or program, insurance policy, against passing through pain as a believer or a non-believer. But God, He could have reduced those pebbles to such small stones that maybe they wouldn't have punctured the skin of Stephen.

He could have turned those stones into the composition, the constitution of cotton wool, but He didn't. And generally speaking, though there are exceptions, He doesn't. He doesn't interfere, generally speaking, with the cause and effect relationship of the physical sciences.

He could, but He has chosen not to. Occasionally, God will open prison doors. He did for Peter, but there have been thousands of those who have known Jesus Christ as Lord, who have been imprisoned, and the doors were never opened miraculously.

Pain is basic to the very existence of the world, says C.S. Lewis, where souls meet. And listen to him, as I quote further from that book I recommended, when souls become wicked, they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another. And this perhaps accounts for four-fifths of the suffering of men.

Lewis says it's men, not God, who have produced racks and whips and prisons and slavery, guns and bayonets and bombs. It is by human avarice and stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. But he goes on to say, there is nonetheless much suffering which cannot be traced to ourselves.

Yet God has allowed pain to come into the experience of men and women internationally and historically down the years. Why does He allow pain? So to afflict us, well again quoting Lewis, pain insists upon, by pain God insists on being heard. He whispers to us in our pleasures, He speaks in our conscience, but He shouts in our pains.

It is His megaphone to rouse a dead world. There is pain in our world ultimately as it will be seen for the common good of men and women. Even though at times, as in cases I have cited, and particularly with my own father, it's very hard to acknowledge and to agree to that, there was the problem of the stones as far as Stephen is concerned in his death that created difficulty for his colleagues in understanding why the man had to suffer.

But there's something else that I want to bring to your attention from this passage and it is the thought of Stephen as a travelling man. You say, what a strange notion, what do you mean? Well Stephen obviously has recognized that he's not at a fixed point in his life in this world. Indeed his sermon has been a rehearsal of the history of the Jews.

Stephen knows this even as a young man that he is advancing with time towards the point when he will be in the presence of the living God. It was rather brilliant of John Bunyan to have called his most notable work Pilgrim's Progress. What is a pilgrim? A pilgrim is someone with no particular fixed abode who is passing through and when the Christian tries to answer the problems posed by varieties of sufferings, he comes back to this point as demonstrated in the life of Stephen.

We are passing through this world. This world is not our home. We are but travelling men and women flashing through the history of Israel.

Stephen indicates that his eyes are on the beyond and he's steering his life's compass by that particular point. It's true, as Lewis points out, our Father God refreshes us on the journey through life with some pleasant inns, pleasant stays in hotels, so to speak, but he does not encourage us to mistake these for home. When you begin to realize that man has been born for life beyond what he knows in this world, then there is a possibility of a very choice, eloquent, satisfying answer for the injustices in this present life.

If one thinks in terms of a scale of balances with their scales on either side, here is this world, but there is something else to outweigh the injustice and that is what the Word of God proclaims most definitely. The Apostle Paul has it in mind when he says in Romans 8, 18, for I am persuaded that the sufferings of this present world are nothing to be compared with the glory that lies beyond. The Bible teaches us that when Adam sinned, not only was he cursed, but the world which had fallen fresh from the hands of God also was effected.

In other words, there are things that you see in the realm of nature and here I am just moving away from my main brief, my subject for this evening. There are things that you see in our world which were never intended by God at the beginning. We have yet to see the world as God originally made it.

That is why in the 8th chapter of the Epistle of Romans, the Apostle Paul speaks of the world almost as though it was animate, almost as though it had got a soul and it says the world is groaning for its deliverance. We have been redeemed, but the world has yet to know the benefits of the saving death of Jesus. And later on in the New Testament and back in the prophecy of Isaiah, you read of God saying that he will create a new heaven and a new earth in which will dwell righteousness.

Paradise, to quote Milton, will be regained and it's that world, that remarkable event in the future that the believer has his or her eyes upon. But until that moment, passing through great difficulties, through intense suffering, there is this delightful prospect of knowing what the travelling man Stephen knew. What is that? The presence of Almighty God.

Here he is, hustled out of the court of the Sanhedrin, pushed down the paved, slabbed roads of Jerusalem, out by the gate which is now called Stephen's Gate, and as he has his eyes towards heaven, he feels the very presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and his onlookers say his face has been transfigured, it's turned even to a glistening face like that of an angel. In the suffering of Stephen, God stepped in, and I have seen that as a pastor time and time and time again in the experience of ordinary people here in Worthing. Johnny, in the book that I recommended to you, speaks how on one occasion she was brought face to face with a young fellow whose handicap was more serious than her own, for she has some neck movement, and those of you who have seen the pictures that she's done through painting and drawing, holding the brush or the pencil on her lips, will appreciate that she's got some abilities, but this fellow could only move his eyelashes, could only blink, and in a remarkable fashion he and his mother and father had devised a means whereby one blink and one particular look of the eyes towards a chart of letters indicated a word that he wanted to spell, and in this prolonged conversation that Johnny has with this young fellow, he tells her how much he is appreciating the day when the Lord Jesus Christ shall return or call him to himself, and he shall be released from all the problems and from all the difficulties he then knows, and when Johnny writes this in the second of her two books, she concludes the chapter with a drawing of her own wheelchair with all its gadgets intact, but a notice, a label, hanging over the back for sale.

She anticipates what it will be like when she's with the Lord, but this is the point. Johnny and the young man know the presence of the Lord. Right now, a blind man said to me at that piano some months ago, two or three years ago to be exact, in this church, I would not ask for my sight back because in having no vision at all I have a greater faith and conception of God than sighted people.

He has given to me the treasures of darkness. The traveling man, Stephen, has an awareness of the presence of God during the whole of the conflict in which he is engaged, and those old ladies in my imagined conversation in Jerusalem will ultimately glory in the testimony that he's left. But let me try and bring things together this evening by talking to you finally about the fruit of suffering, the fruit of suffering.

You remember it's in the book of Job that you come across a dimension that generally speaking you do not think much about. You know of Job. He's a man who has a plague of boils.

He's a man who figures in one of the oldest books in the first part of the Bible and he has a tremendous tussle in holding on to faith in the living God. But what insight do you get at the beginning of the book of Job? You're taken into the heavenly dimension. We see the world not just in terms of the here and now but in terms of the heavenly and the divine and there's a conversation going on in the heavenlies with the Lord God.

Satan, the accuser of the brethren, the man or the the power that tries to disinfect us of any faith in God from God at all, tries to take us away from the Lord is engaged in conversation and the Lord says to Satan you see my servant Job he's a righteous man and whatever you do and ultimately he gives him the power to touch his body I tell you this Job's faith and confidence in me will remain intact. There's not time to go through the event of the book of Job. You can read it through yourself but towards the end you come across the tremendous encounter that Job himself has with almighty God and there's the vindication of Job's faith as Satan is put to flight for Job has remained true and God's confidence in Job proves to be accurate.

One of the benefits of suffering my friend is registered in heaven as God brings into play this whole satanic conflict between himself and the devil with men involved in the middle. You see that lady in Worthing Hospital suffering from cancer, Satan I tell you that all the addresses she ever heard at Worthing Tabernacle that all the fellowship that she enjoyed during periods of health will hold her in such good stead that even though her body is wracked with the most diabolical pain she will remain true to me. There is in Jerusalem a museum no that's the wrong word a shrine by the name of Yad Vashem it is a memorial to the Jews who died in the Holocaust of the Germans and that memorial not only depicts the courage of the Jews and the Jewish resistance it also has as you walk down the tree lined drive up to the main gates plaques commemorating French resistance Italian resistance Austrian resistance Scandinavian resistance British resistance everyone who worked for the preservation and the security of the Jewish people is acknowledged in one of the most remarkable shrines I have ever seen on this earth.

It's Francis Schaeffer's wife who says this that heaven will have its own Yad Vashem and in an era that is yet to be it will be possible to go down the shrine of heaven and see there the memorial plaque so to speak of men and women who endured great suffering and difficulty and injustice while they were on this earth and yet they kept faith in the living God and that is added up by God as being part of the righteous bounty of those who keep faith with him and do not succumb to the taunts of the devil. Suffering in itself has the benefit of a memorial in the life yet to be. This is a prayer that was taken out of Ravensbrück concentration camp when it was liberated the same camp in which Kari Temboom and her sister were imprisoned.

Oh Lord remember not only the men and women of good will but also those of ill will but do not only remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us remember the fruits we brought thanks to this suffering our comradeship, our loyalty our humility, our courage the generosity the greatness of heart which has grown out of this and when they come to judgment let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness. It is amazing the consequences that pain and suffering can have in our world during the centuries and to this present moment of time. Here is Stephen he slumps to the ground he's a dead man but the final prayer he gasps before his heart stops beating and pumping the blood around his body was father, forgive them the same words of Jesus and amongst the crowd that was stoning him there was a man looking after the clothes whose name was Saul Saul never forgot the death of Stephen with rage later on he persecutes the Christians at Jerusalem he hounds them to death he has them imprisoned those of you again who are occupied with the miraculous in the acts look at these people crowds of them who are punished and persecuted and almighty God does not stop Saul doing what he was about but go to the ninth chapter and here is Saul on his horse with a company of men heading towards Damascus and suddenly he's stopped by a bright light which shines and he hears a voice and he falls to the ground and listens Saul, Saul why persecutes thou me? Who are you Lord? I'm Jesus who you're persecuting Jesus who identifies himself with the suffering of Stephen and with those men and women that you've thrown into jail and the others that have been killed Jesus who identifies with all the suffering and the injustice that there is in this world I am Jesus and Paul responds by acknowledging who he is and ultimately becoming the greatest evangelist and herald of the gospel of Jesus Christ never I reckon did Paul ever forget the death of Stephen and what he did to the Christians at Jerusalem even down the years of his life as a missionary and evangelist saints did I say I there remembered faces bold men and women who I sought and slew how when I reach the heavenly places Stephen will I weep for them and you out of the death of Stephen comes Paul out of the sacrifice comes potential for the ongoing of the purposes of God and this my friend is not the whole of the answer but it's the beginnings of the answer to the problem why does God allow men to suffer he does so because suffering and injury and hardship even the deformity of a child that he permits though he does not decree can in his divine purpose bring about his will on this earth and in the new heaven and the new earth that is beyond in all their affliction says the Lord God I was afflicted and he points to the cruelty and the barbarity of Calvary and he says there in the pain of my son is the evidence that I share in the suffering of this world and in the resurrection of my son from the dead is the promise that wrong will be righted the balances will be evened out and the just God of the universe shall be shown to be righteous and fair in all his dealings Amen