Doubt of Unfair Suffering

Well, last Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. Ian who led the service, he stepped in at the last minute for Penny who wrote down some things at the beginning of the service. So between the two of them, they asked this question. They said, "Every day we see people we believe to be good suffering while bad people seem to get away with things and people everywhere are troubled by God's apparent lack of interest. How do we explain this to people?" No pressure, Greg, that's what they said. So I was thinking during the week, and I know it's a week late, but I thought tonight we might spend a few minutes just thinking about this question, the question of unjust suffering in the world.

The Sufferer and the Spectator

Who are the sorts of people who ask this question? I'm thinking firstly of the sort of person who might ask this question as someone who is currently suffering in some way. They are people right now who are in physical pain or emotional pain, people who do not see the point of what is happening. They might not know whether they can keep going. It may be that their body is aching, or it might be that they're fighting some painful disease. It might be that the pain they're experiencing at the moment is relational and it's excruciating, it might be rejection or separation or bereavement. For some people, it could just be depression, and when a depression strikes, everything is affected, nothing helps. A person could be sitting, for example, in extended care. Everything and everyone has been taken away from them, and they do not see the purpose of enduring. A person could be in jail with no prospect of being released, certainly not in the near future. A person could right now be being physically attacked. They may have no answers, they may have no resources, they may have no provisions, they may have no help.

And if you happen to know someone like that, it's easy to throw cheap promises at them, cheap promises maybe from the Bible even. "All things work together for good for those who love God," which doesn't really help, because you ask yourself, well, why is all this thing happening for me? It doesn't actually sound all that good. Like Job's counselors, sometimes those promises can be more irritating than anything. Better in that situation to be the friend who'll say, "Look, I don't know what's going on either, but I'll stick with you."

So you might be the sort of person who's currently suffering, or you might be the sort of person who's just trying to make sense of the world. Why is the world as it is? Why is half the world starving when there's actually enough food to feed everybody? Why are there atrocities? Why do tragedies seem to be so random? And why are there so many personal griefs? I have conducted the funeral of a baby. I have buried a young Olympic swimmer, a young father of young children, a young person who had taken their own life, or someone who dies suddenly for no reason, or whose life was taken by cancer. I've done all of those. If I had to ask people here today, what have you seen, what have you felt, what have you experienced, there's an enormous amount of personal grief which we've been through.

It's part of living in the modern world. In our modern world, we get this complex mix. We're privileged to enjoy things like anesthetics and Panadol to relieve pain, but we're also exposed to social media, which is able to do a lot of good, but also a lot of damage, where we live in houses with air conditioning, but we also have screens in our houses that show us far more of what's going wrong in the world than anybody else has been forced to cope with ever. And so it's easy to turn into sad and overwhelmed spectators.

A Song of Struggle (Psalm 73)

So what do you make of it all? What do you make of this seemingly unjust suffering? An atheist like Richard Dawkins would say, "Well, it's simple. The universe is just blind, pitiless indifference. What you observe, the chaos you observe, is just the way the universe is."

The Bible writers take things slightly differently, maybe quite differently. Psalm 13, for example, the psalmist says, "How long, O Lord?" And you can almost feel the emotion and the pain in the sentence. Or the psalmist in Psalm 10 says, "Why do you stand far off, O Lord?" He might have said, "You don't seem interested, do you not care?"

And there have been people over the years, and oceans of ink have been spilt on trying to come up with what we might call theodicies. A theodicy is the technical term for a defense of God in the context of evil and suffering. How can God be good and powerful when there is so much evil and suffering?

And we could do that, we could spend time thinking about those questions. But instead, what I'm going to offer you is something different, and I'm going to offer you a song. I'm not going to sing it, but the song is found here in Psalm 73 that Liz read for us. The composer is a man called Asaph, and he wrote Psalm 73, a song which is a great treasure for us because he can give us answers. What he does is he in one hand can hold his experience of the suffering in the world, and in the other, he can hand the facts of God, and he tells us about these things.

And his struggle is with a God who rules over a world that's very, very messy. There's unfair suffering and there's unfair success. And let's face it, it's true, some people are very, very successful for no apparent reason. In fact, if you're an international cricketer, you can make millions and millions of dollars for your whole career just by simply being able to propel a leather ball 22 meters down to a grass pitch towards three sticks, and a man with another big stick hits the ball away, and you can make millions of dollars that way. It's a strange, strange world.

Well, Asaph says in verse two, he says, "But as for me, my feet had almost slipped, I'd nearly lost my foothold." He's talking about his walking with God, and he says, "My foot almost slipped. It was almost fatal." He starts in verse one with "Surely God is good to Israel." It's like a creed, "Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart." But the rest of it is almost like a protest song or an angst-ridden heavy metal song, because he's saying, even though God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart, it doesn't seem to work like that for me. "My feet had almost stumbled."

Why? What's the problem? Well, he says verse three, "Because I envied the arrogant." In other words, he looked around and he saw the proud and the arrogant, the people who were against God, and things were going fantastically for them. He says they are prosperous and they are wealthy. Verse three, they're untroubled, they're at peace. Verses four and five, they've got no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. These are the beautiful people who, according to that song from the 1980s, ride $2,000 push bikes in the park, have snapped frozen potted palms in the corner of the living room. If you know the song by that great Australian band Crawl, that's the song, Beautiful People. That's who he's looking at.

He's looking at them. He says in verses six to nine, they're full of pride and arrogance. You might see it there in front of you in the red Bibles, page 575, the portion on the right-hand side, verse 6: "Therefore, their pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. From their callous hearts comes iniquity; the evil conceits of their minds know no limits. They scoff and speak with malice; in their arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth." He says they're praised by others. Most people would love to be like them. I mean, be honest, who wouldn't like to be like these people?

And then Asaph contrasts himself with them. See verse 13: "Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain I have washed my hands in innocence. All day long I've been plagued; I've been punished every morning." It's like he's saying, "God, I'm really trying. I'm trying hard. I'm trying hard to honor you, and it's difficult. I'm trying hard." You know when the temptation is to really run people down verbally? I'm trying really hard not to do that. You know, I'm the sort of person who turns up for things, God, you know, I'm there each Sunday at church. I'm not just finding other things to do. He's trying his best to live rightly, to live in a way that's pleasing to God, and it's difficult. And he's saying, "I'm suffering, and they're not at all."

One of the real beauties of the Psalms is they're so earthy and honest in their struggle with the absurdity of life, because it should be that if you go God's way, God's designed the world, if you go the way he's designed the world, then life should be easier. But he's saying with the psalmist says, "So often it's not the case." Psalm 1, for example, says, "If you meditate on God's Lord day and night, you'll be like a tree beside streams of water." That sounds good. And he says in the same Psalm, Psalm 1, the wicked, they're like the chaff, they just blow away. But this man Asaph is saying, "I feel more like the chaff. I feel like I'm being blown away." So the confidence of Psalm 1 doesn't seem to make sense to him.

And he's on the edge of becoming bitter and cynical. He's hit the very bottom. And when you hit the very bottom, that can be where you turn one way or the other, you come down on one side or the other of God and his purposes.

The Turning Point

Well, this is Asaph's turning point. You can see it over on page 576, verse 16: "When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me." Verse 17: "Till I entered the sanctuary of God." It was confusing until he went to the sanctuary of God. He made the deliberate trip to the sanctuary, to the temple in Jerusalem, the meeting place of God with people, the meeting place between heaven and earth, the place set up to remind them of the history of God's dealing with his people.

And there, for some reason, he gains insight. It's like the camera rolls ahead to the end credits and he sees their end and he sees their conclusion, and it is very sad. Verse 17: "Then I understood their final destiny. Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors! As a dream when one awakes, so when you arise, O Lord, you'll despise them as fantasies."

These parts of the Bible can sometimes make us feel a bit squeamish and a bit uncomfortable, but the fact is that God has fixed a day when all oppression will be judged. God will not just shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, well, that's just the way it goes." The world is not just blind, pitiless indifference. There is a reckoning that all will face. And is this not something we all need to see and we all need to be reminded of, to have the capacity not just to see the present moment, but the whole canvas, the whole movie, the whole story of life, the universe and everything, right to the very end credits?

It's like the first game in tennis is not the match. Whoever wins the first game means very, very little in the context of the match. The first hole in golf is not the whole round of golf. The bloke who wears the yellow jersey on day one of the Tour de France is not the winner. He's just ahead after the first day. Realism says it's all about finishing.

And if you know the story of Jesus, and you didn't know the ending, and you got to the crucifixion, you could think to yourself that there can't possibly be a God if a man like that dies the way this man did. If someone that loving and that kind and that honest and that selfless gets nailed to a cross, and God does nothing, you can't understand it until you see the end where he rises from the dead. That's the point. Death and human evil will not have the last word. It's critical to see what happens at the end. It doesn't matter who's ahead at half-time, it matters at the end.

And this man Asaph sees things as they really are. This is the turning point in his thinking, and it leads to this extraordinary treasure where he only discovers this only after he's gone through the fire and his faith is pushed to the very edge.

Jane Fonda is a reasonably famous movie star, and she was a very famous star of the 1960s and 70s and perhaps 80s and things like that. And apparently in the early 2000s, she became a Christian. She was married to media mogul Ted Turner, who had this great cable TV empire. And apparently one of the reasons he divorced her was because she became Christian. He said, "Christianity is for losers. Anyone who worships a crucified man is a fool." But apparently when he was younger, Ted Turner wanted to be a missionary. He wrestled with doubt as a young man, and for Ted Turner, the catalyst was his little sister, Mary Jane, who developed a terminal disease and died. And he could not bring that together with his faith.

But, you know, it's not good enough to say that suffering disproves God's power and love and his wisdom, because when two people go through the same experience, and one comes through resenting God and one comes through resting in God, it's just not enough to say that suffering will therefore cause unbelief. Because there are many people who go through exactly the same experience that others have turned away from God because of, and they have found God to be wise and loving and faithful and gracious and comforting and their rock.

The New Grip of Faith

And that's what happens to Asaph. Asaph gets a new look at himself. See verse 21, he says, "When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered," verse 22, "I was senseless and ignorant; I was like a brute beast before you." He looks back on how he got angry with God, seeing the wicked prosper, how he thought God had wrecked the universe and wasn't really fit to be called God because of the way he was running things. And Asaph was like a dumb animal.

Nevertheless, verse 23: "I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand." This is his great realization, and it's a great treasure. He realizes, "I'm continually with you." Even when he was behaving badly towards God, he recognizes that he's still with God. Even then, God is holding his hand. Not him holding God's hand. I mean, he might have been having a go at trying to hold on to God's hand, but much more importantly, God was holding him.

Jesus himself says, "I'll not let you go. Put your faith in him, and he will hold you." When you're angry with him and misunderstand him, he will hold your hand. When you're bringing him dishonor and discredit, he'll still hold you. He will not forsake you. When I was younger and my children, we would go to the beach with them and you might take them in the surf, and they think they're holding on to your hand, but you're holding on to their hand. Even if they let go, you're not going to let go. The parent is doing the holding.

Or you might know at some stage in your life, to get to an age where mentally you just can't remember anymore, and you feel like that trying to hold on to God is just impossible and tempted to think, "It's all me and I just can't do it anymore." But there he will hold me fast as well. That's what God does for us.

And then Asaph comes to this monumental conclusion, verse 25. He says, "Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth is nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." He speaks of his love for God, his love for the only God. Not God if you are somehow out there. Not God, my higher being. Not God, the force within you. He says, "I have but one God in heaven." My trust is in one person, one personal God. All my eggs are in the one basket. I put my life into the hands of Jesus. I've thrown myself onto him, and it's the Lord Jesus Christ who he is trusting, even though he doesn't know that's the case, but that is where his trust is. It's not an each-way bet, it's not the favorite for the race and the outsider. It's just God, it's just Jesus. This is the language of love for the one God. This man says, "I choose you."

He does not want the lifestyle of ease, he just wants God. This man is in the grip of God's presence. He relies on God as his ruler. This God is his precious treasure.

And in a way, his life hasn't changed. It's not like the enemies have suddenly rolled over or crashed to earth, or he's suddenly now worth a million dollars. He just sees things differently. He sees them differently. He understands God differently. He sees himself differently. And he ends up with a much more mature faith. He starts off with a very naive faith: "Just trust God, it'll all work out." But then he goes through the fires of doubt and he's now more mature, a much more mature faith. Sure there are big disappointments, we all face them. He would have faced them, faced more disappointments.

Sometimes we just maybe need to get a bit of perspective, because sometimes the thing we're disappointed about turn out to be fairly meager from the vantage point of eternity. They're fairly meager on even a world scale. We sometimes need just a bit of perspective. But where this man finishes is with a much bigger understanding of the good. It's a relational good, because he says, "I know you. Whom have I in heaven but you, and there is none on earth I desire besides you?" This God who never let your hand go. This God who will lead you if you'll let him. He'll be your strength in the depths of weakness and the depths of sadness. So this is maturity—to learn to desire not God's blessings, but God himself. To appreciate him, to know him more richly.

And this might not happen for you quickly. This might happen slowly. Most deep relationships take some time. They don't happen overnight. But there can be nothing deeper than knowing the living God through his son.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray.

Our heavenly father, we thank you for this man Asaph. We thank you for the journey of understanding, the journey that begins with doubt and goes through the fires of doubt and finally comes to a better place. And although his answer is not the answer to the whole problem, it does give us a very real and human window into the messiness of our world and how you stand behind it all, and you stand close to us, and you stand ready as Father and friend. We thank you for that in Jesus' name. Amen.

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