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| Richard F. Speece Pastor Bob Moore Director of Music |
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PAGE 2
Page 2
Calvary Baptist
Church
Church
Bradenton, Florida
STARTING POINT: One man said this to a Christian, “If there is a God, as you
say, then I don’t want anything to do with Him because He made a world full of
suffering.”
INCORRECT ASSUMPTION:
It is first necessary to establish that the Bible does not teach that God made “a
world full of suffering.” In fact, it teaches that God made a world without any
suffering. The creation account in GEN 1 has this refrain punctuating nearly
every paragraph describing God’s creative activities: “And God saw that it was
good.”
1:4 “And God saw that the light was good.”
1:10 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:12 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:18 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:21 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:25 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:31 “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very
good.”
In GEN 2 the author elaborates on the creation of mankind. As he gives details
of the creation of the first man and woman and the garden in which God placed
them we find nothing that would indicate there was suffering. In fact, we get just
the opposite impression. Their home is a pristine environment out of which flow
several rivers into lands noted for the precious gems and precious metals
located there. It is a wonderful place without a hint of suffering. In addition,
Adam is capable of giving each of the animals a name appropriate to it.
Effortlessly, it appears, he creates a taxonomy of the animal kingdom. Certainly
we cannot conclude that he was mentally deficient in any way.
The naming of the animals, however, did point up one lack in his veritable
paradise. Adam was alone, and aloneness is not a good thing. Then God
rectified that by causing Adam to fall asleep, taking one of his ribs and
fashioning him a woman. When Adam awakes he is ecstatic over this one who
was made to be his perfect complement.
We must conclude that there is no indication whatsoever that God created a
world full of suffering. In fact, he created a world without any suffering at all. It
was absolutely perfect, free from defect.
QUESTION: If God did not create a world with suffering, then how did it come to
be a world with suffering?
GEN 3 answers this question. The world became a world with suffering as a
direct result of the disobedience of God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
3:14 - the serpent is cursed and crawls on his belly from then on
3:16 - the woman will experience pain in childbirth
3:17 - the man will toil to arrest a living from the ground until he returns
to the dust from which he came
QUESTION: Was it good of God to put the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil in the garden, for without that, the man and the woman wouldn’t have
disobeyed?
If God had not put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden,
then Adam and Eve would have had no way of showing God that they
appreciated all that he had done for them in giving them the perfect place to live
and the wonderful companionship of one another. He did not burden them with
many commands, but simply gave them a single command which by obeying
they would show that they trusted him and were grateful for his generosity to
them. It was a test for them.
To put this test in perspective, imagine an orange grove or an apple orchard
covering hundreds and hundreds of acres with literally thousands and
thousands of trees. Now you are told by the owner of the orchard that you may
eat the fruit of any of the trees except for one, and that one you must not eat
from. Now how stingy is that? How restrictive is that? How would it hamper you
from finding fulfillment? It wouldn’t, but it would clearly reveal whether or not
you were willing to respect the authority of the owner and obey his wishes.
Although all the evidence Adam and Eve had pointed to God being only good
toward them and thus fully trustworthy, Eve, at the coaching of the serpent,
chose to believe that God had not been completely good to them; that he was in
fact holding out on them. And thus she disobeyed God’s command and ate fruit
from the tree. She gave it to Adam, and he, knowing full well what he was
doing, chose to disregard the command of God and joined his wife in eating. It
was that act of disobedience that perverted the perfect world God had made.
POINT: People cause suffering. Suffering in this world began with Adam and
every person ever since has compounded the suffering of this world. This is
especially easy to see when anyone violates the one of the commandments, like
the commandment not to murder. He causes the person whom he murdered to
suffer, but the suffering doesn’t stop there. He has bereaved a woman of her
husband, the bread winner in the family. He has also taken away the children’s
father. He has also taken away someone’s brother and someone’s son.
QUESTION: Is it reasonable to believe that an act of disobedience can cause
an environment to be perverted and that causes suffering for others?
Once we note that Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience was essentially an act
of selfishness we realize that examples abound. In the mountains logging
companies have clear-cut the forest leaving thousands of acres of land without
any covering at all. The next year, when heavy rains come, wholesale erosion
follows because the roots of trees which held back the soil have rotted away. In
addition, without the forest the absorption capacity of the land is reduced
drastically. The rain water runs off so quickly that the rivers flood, destroying
farmlands and sweeping away homes and livestock located far downstream.
The following year the water table in the valleys at the foot of the mountains is
affected because of the minimal absorption the year before. Springs go dry
and the wildlife suffers.
Each day a multinational mining company pulverizes another chunk of a
whole mountain in great rock crushers so that it may extract the gold and silver.
The extraction process requires the use of mercury. The company is not
vigilant enough to keep the mercury from getting into the local streams, and
within a few short years it is found that the fish have very high levels of mercury,
and that was discovered because it was found that natives living along the river
were dying of mercury poisoning. Fish from the river, it so happens, made up a
substantial portion of their diet each day.
POINT: Since people are the cause of suffering, God could eliminate suffering,
but in order to do so he would have to eliminate people. But this probably is not
the kind of solution people who object to the notion of a loving God want to
hear, for that would mean that their lives as well would be terminated.
Therefore, we ought to ask ourselves what other ways might there be for God to
eliminate suffering. He could have made the garden without the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil and not given the man and woman any opportunity
to rebel. Had God done that, then there would be no evil, but the nature of
mankind would have been radically different, for they would not have been
capable of choosing to disobey. They would in essence have been
programmed with instincts like animals.
POINT: For there to be real choices, there must be real consequences which
attend the choices. The consequences cannot be arbitrarily assigned but must
be consistent and regular if there are to be real choices confronting people.
For example if I choose to walk on one path that is reported to lead to the lake,
there must be a lake at the end of the path. Otherwise the path is not a real
choice. If another path is reported to lead to the forest, it is a real option only if
in fact it does lead to a forest.
The path placed in the garden of Eden was actually a tree whose eating led to a
particular destination, death and suffering, as God had warned. It is only
because there were the real consequence of death and suffering that there
were real options confronting Adam and Eve.
Real choices can only be made when there are real options with consequences
which necessarily follow.
QUESTION: Why did God make the consequences of disobedience so
severe? Presumably he could have made the consequences much lighter.
It seems to me that he made the consequences so severe in order that we
might see how devastating it is to rebel against him. For example, if a parent
tells his child not to throw his food on the floor and there is no consequence to
his throwing his supper on the floor, then it is easy to understand that he isn’t
going to be convinced that there is anything wrong with doing that. If a parent
tells his child not to throw food on the floor and then tells him the consequence
will be that he has to watch while mom cleans it up, he probably won’t quit
throwing food on the floor until he gets bored watching mom clean it up. If,
however, a parent tells his child not to toss food on the floor and adds that if he
does he will be spanked or not be given dessert or sent to bed immediately,
then the consequences are severe enough to alert the child as to how serious it
must be in the eyes of his parents for him to disregard their command. He may
still toss food on the floor to test out whether you were serious or not, but if he
consistently reaps the same painful consequences for throwing food on the
floor, he will either come to respect the boundary or know from experience that
not respecting the boundary has inevitable undesirable consequences.
QUESTION: Rather than being born into a world perverted by the disobedience
of someone else and thus full of suffering, why didn’t God give each of us the
same choice as Adam and Eve had?
We don’t know the answer to this question, but it may be simply that given the
same circumstances and enough time all of us would have chosen to rebel
against God. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are born into a world that
has been radically perverted by the disobedience of the first human beings and
all of us have continued in the same vein ever since.
QUESTION: Why doesn’t God provide a remedy to this perverted world so full
of suffering?
The answer is simply he did. He did it through the person of his Son, Jesus
Christ, who invaded this planet and lived a life in complete obedience to His
Father. By means of acknowledging we are sinners, without any means of
satisfying God’s righteous demands, and trusting Him to rescue us we have his
righteousness credited to us so that we are established perfect with God and
thus are able to spend eternity with him in heaven, where there is no suffering.
QUESTION: Why should I be made to suffer for Adam’s sin?
Tell the story of the guy who cracked rocks in the quarry while repeatedly
saying, “All because of Adam.”
say, then I don’t want anything to do with Him because He made a world full of
suffering.”
INCORRECT ASSUMPTION:
It is first necessary to establish that the Bible does not teach that God made “a
world full of suffering.” In fact, it teaches that God made a world without any
suffering. The creation account in GEN 1 has this refrain punctuating nearly
every paragraph describing God’s creative activities: “And God saw that it was
good.”
1:4 “And God saw that the light was good.”
1:10 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:12 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:18 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:21 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:25 “...and God saw that it was good.”
1:31 “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very
good.”
In GEN 2 the author elaborates on the creation of mankind. As he gives details
of the creation of the first man and woman and the garden in which God placed
them we find nothing that would indicate there was suffering. In fact, we get just
the opposite impression. Their home is a pristine environment out of which flow
several rivers into lands noted for the precious gems and precious metals
located there. It is a wonderful place without a hint of suffering. In addition,
Adam is capable of giving each of the animals a name appropriate to it.
Effortlessly, it appears, he creates a taxonomy of the animal kingdom. Certainly
we cannot conclude that he was mentally deficient in any way.
The naming of the animals, however, did point up one lack in his veritable
paradise. Adam was alone, and aloneness is not a good thing. Then God
rectified that by causing Adam to fall asleep, taking one of his ribs and
fashioning him a woman. When Adam awakes he is ecstatic over this one who
was made to be his perfect complement.
We must conclude that there is no indication whatsoever that God created a
world full of suffering. In fact, he created a world without any suffering at all. It
was absolutely perfect, free from defect.
QUESTION: If God did not create a world with suffering, then how did it come to
be a world with suffering?
GEN 3 answers this question. The world became a world with suffering as a
direct result of the disobedience of God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
3:14 - the serpent is cursed and crawls on his belly from then on
3:16 - the woman will experience pain in childbirth
3:17 - the man will toil to arrest a living from the ground until he returns
to the dust from which he came
QUESTION: Was it good of God to put the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil in the garden, for without that, the man and the woman wouldn’t have
disobeyed?
If God had not put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden,
then Adam and Eve would have had no way of showing God that they
appreciated all that he had done for them in giving them the perfect place to live
and the wonderful companionship of one another. He did not burden them with
many commands, but simply gave them a single command which by obeying
they would show that they trusted him and were grateful for his generosity to
them. It was a test for them.
To put this test in perspective, imagine an orange grove or an apple orchard
covering hundreds and hundreds of acres with literally thousands and
thousands of trees. Now you are told by the owner of the orchard that you may
eat the fruit of any of the trees except for one, and that one you must not eat
from. Now how stingy is that? How restrictive is that? How would it hamper you
from finding fulfillment? It wouldn’t, but it would clearly reveal whether or not
you were willing to respect the authority of the owner and obey his wishes.
Although all the evidence Adam and Eve had pointed to God being only good
toward them and thus fully trustworthy, Eve, at the coaching of the serpent,
chose to believe that God had not been completely good to them; that he was in
fact holding out on them. And thus she disobeyed God’s command and ate fruit
from the tree. She gave it to Adam, and he, knowing full well what he was
doing, chose to disregard the command of God and joined his wife in eating. It
was that act of disobedience that perverted the perfect world God had made.
POINT: People cause suffering. Suffering in this world began with Adam and
every person ever since has compounded the suffering of this world. This is
especially easy to see when anyone violates the one of the commandments, like
the commandment not to murder. He causes the person whom he murdered to
suffer, but the suffering doesn’t stop there. He has bereaved a woman of her
husband, the bread winner in the family. He has also taken away the children’s
father. He has also taken away someone’s brother and someone’s son.
QUESTION: Is it reasonable to believe that an act of disobedience can cause
an environment to be perverted and that causes suffering for others?
Once we note that Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience was essentially an act
of selfishness we realize that examples abound. In the mountains logging
companies have clear-cut the forest leaving thousands of acres of land without
any covering at all. The next year, when heavy rains come, wholesale erosion
follows because the roots of trees which held back the soil have rotted away. In
addition, without the forest the absorption capacity of the land is reduced
drastically. The rain water runs off so quickly that the rivers flood, destroying
farmlands and sweeping away homes and livestock located far downstream.
The following year the water table in the valleys at the foot of the mountains is
affected because of the minimal absorption the year before. Springs go dry
and the wildlife suffers.
Each day a multinational mining company pulverizes another chunk of a
whole mountain in great rock crushers so that it may extract the gold and silver.
The extraction process requires the use of mercury. The company is not
vigilant enough to keep the mercury from getting into the local streams, and
within a few short years it is found that the fish have very high levels of mercury,
and that was discovered because it was found that natives living along the river
were dying of mercury poisoning. Fish from the river, it so happens, made up a
substantial portion of their diet each day.
POINT: Since people are the cause of suffering, God could eliminate suffering,
but in order to do so he would have to eliminate people. But this probably is not
the kind of solution people who object to the notion of a loving God want to
hear, for that would mean that their lives as well would be terminated.
Therefore, we ought to ask ourselves what other ways might there be for God to
eliminate suffering. He could have made the garden without the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil and not given the man and woman any opportunity
to rebel. Had God done that, then there would be no evil, but the nature of
mankind would have been radically different, for they would not have been
capable of choosing to disobey. They would in essence have been
programmed with instincts like animals.
POINT: For there to be real choices, there must be real consequences which
attend the choices. The consequences cannot be arbitrarily assigned but must
be consistent and regular if there are to be real choices confronting people.
For example if I choose to walk on one path that is reported to lead to the lake,
there must be a lake at the end of the path. Otherwise the path is not a real
choice. If another path is reported to lead to the forest, it is a real option only if
in fact it does lead to a forest.
The path placed in the garden of Eden was actually a tree whose eating led to a
particular destination, death and suffering, as God had warned. It is only
because there were the real consequence of death and suffering that there
were real options confronting Adam and Eve.
Real choices can only be made when there are real options with consequences
which necessarily follow.
QUESTION: Why did God make the consequences of disobedience so
severe? Presumably he could have made the consequences much lighter.
It seems to me that he made the consequences so severe in order that we
might see how devastating it is to rebel against him. For example, if a parent
tells his child not to throw his food on the floor and there is no consequence to
his throwing his supper on the floor, then it is easy to understand that he isn’t
going to be convinced that there is anything wrong with doing that. If a parent
tells his child not to throw food on the floor and then tells him the consequence
will be that he has to watch while mom cleans it up, he probably won’t quit
throwing food on the floor until he gets bored watching mom clean it up. If,
however, a parent tells his child not to toss food on the floor and adds that if he
does he will be spanked or not be given dessert or sent to bed immediately,
then the consequences are severe enough to alert the child as to how serious it
must be in the eyes of his parents for him to disregard their command. He may
still toss food on the floor to test out whether you were serious or not, but if he
consistently reaps the same painful consequences for throwing food on the
floor, he will either come to respect the boundary or know from experience that
not respecting the boundary has inevitable undesirable consequences.
QUESTION: Rather than being born into a world perverted by the disobedience
of someone else and thus full of suffering, why didn’t God give each of us the
same choice as Adam and Eve had?
We don’t know the answer to this question, but it may be simply that given the
same circumstances and enough time all of us would have chosen to rebel
against God. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are born into a world that
has been radically perverted by the disobedience of the first human beings and
all of us have continued in the same vein ever since.
QUESTION: Why doesn’t God provide a remedy to this perverted world so full
of suffering?
The answer is simply he did. He did it through the person of his Son, Jesus
Christ, who invaded this planet and lived a life in complete obedience to His
Father. By means of acknowledging we are sinners, without any means of
satisfying God’s righteous demands, and trusting Him to rescue us we have his
righteousness credited to us so that we are established perfect with God and
thus are able to spend eternity with him in heaven, where there is no suffering.
QUESTION: Why should I be made to suffer for Adam’s sin?
Tell the story of the guy who cracked rocks in the quarry while repeatedly
saying, “All because of Adam.”
| Extracted from notes used in a Sunday School class 18 May 03 at Calvary Baptist Church, Bradenton-FL. |
| Pastor Rick Speece December 2005 |