I think the first prayer that I ever learned
as a child, was the simple table grace that my grandmother taught me and I think every
child in America learns that one time or another, and it goes like this, "God is great, God
is good and we thank Him for this food." I don't know who first composed that prayer,
but I think the prayer somehow was supposed to rhyme, and when my grandmother said it,
it did rhyme. She said God is great, God is good, and we
thank Him for this "food," and I always thought that was strange and she used to call that
thing that was on top of our house, the "roof," and that's just a different generation, but
like many children, I memorized that table grace and would say it by rote without any
deep meaning or appreciation for the words I was expressing. And it wasn't, of course, until many, many
years later when I became a serious student of theology, that I discovered that the two
attributes of God that were contained in that child's prayer, God is great and God is good,
that both of these concepts, the greatness of God and the goodness of God, are subsumed
in one single word in sacred Scripture, and that word that captures both of these concepts
in one word is the word "holy." I want to take a minute to explain that because
we don't normally think of the word "holy" to refer to two different things. I think the standard accepted understanding
of the term "holy" in Scripture is that word, that meaning that we ascribe to God whereby
we refer to God's purity, that the holiness of God expresses His absolutely perfect purity
in which there's no shadow of turning within Him, no blemish on His character, and so on. And certainly, if we look at the, the lexicons
of biblical words, we will see under the word "holy," that the secondary meaning of the
term is "purity," but the primary meaning of the term "holy" in sacred Scripture refers
to God's otherness, the sense in which He is different from everything in creation. The holiness of God directs our attention
to His transcendent august majesty, so that when we say that he is holy, we're not only
saying that He is pure, we're not only saying simply that He is good, but we are saying
that He is great. In fact, that's the primary reference to the
word. But, what we're concerned about in this session
is not so much His greatness, for the moment, but rather we're concerned for His goodness. And I want us to think this through a little
bit and ask the question together, "What do we mean when we say that God is good? In what sense can be said of God that He is
good?" I think we know that the Scriptures teach
that God is the source, the fountainhead of all goodness, and that there is an inseparable
bond and relationship between our understanding of goodness and our understanding of God. Even the ancient Greek philosophers, for example,
Aristotle and Plato, saw a link between goodness and God. Aristotle, in trying to define ethics, understood
that for any ethical system to mean anything, there has to be a standard for goodness. Acts and ideas and principles can only be
deemed to be good or bad according to some standard. And if the standard is a constantly sliding,
shifting, relativistic norm, we can never know for sure whether something is good or
not. And so, Aristotle sought for what he called
the summum bonum, the highest good and he linked that with the ultimate Being. Plato called God, the idea of the good. Now again, in theology, one of the great debates
historically has been, "How does God relate to the concept of the good?" Is there some kind of standard for goodness
that is independent from God? Is there a law, for example, that defines
goodness that is over God, and by which God is judged? Technically, we ask in theology, is God sub
lego? Is God under law? Is there some cosmic law of goodness that
even God is required to obey? or is God outside of law, apart from law? Is He, again, as the theologians say ex lex,
not ex-lax, outside of the law? Well, both ideas, that God is under some independent
standard that exists outside of Him, or that God is a maverick to the law, accountable
to nothing, sort of free to act in any arbitrary, whimsical, capricious way that He so please,
both of those concepts have been categorically rejected by orthodox Christianity. And the biblical concept is this, that there
is a law of goodness that even God must obey, and by which God Himself is judged, and that
goodness, however, is not something apart from Him, but the ultimate norm for goodness,
the standard of goodness itself, is the eternal character of God Himself. When we say that God is a law unto Himself,
we mean that God always acts and behaves according to His nature, acccording to His own character,
and that character is altogether holy. That character is altogether righteous. One more technical distinction, then I'm going
to make it simple. In theology, we distinguish between the iustitia
interna and the iustitia externa of God, that is the internal righteousness of God, and
the external righteousness of God. That distinction in simple terms simply means
this, that what God does externally is always perfectly consistent with what He is internally. His behavior is pure because His being is
pure. There is a consistency between the fruit and
the tree. Now, the goodness of God has been disputed
by many people and in many ways, and on many occasions. The philosopher, John Stuart Mill, for example,
said that Christianity and Judaism together both teach that God is all powerful and all
good, and Mill's criticism was this, that Christianity wants to have its cake and eat
it, too, that both of these propositions cannot be equally true. And the reason for the protest of John Stuart
Mill was this, that Mill looked at a world that is filled with pain, with suffering,
with grief, and with evil, and he says, "If God is all powerful and allows the pain that
you know and that you experience, the suffering that has afflicted you, if God is all powerful
and allows the degree of evil that casts a shadow over the joy of human life, then He
cannot possibly be good. But if God is indeed altogether good and yet
we still find this problem of pain, of suffering, and of evil in the world, then the only explanation
we can give is that God is powerless to overcome the grief and the pain and the evil that is
so much a part of our lives. In other words, if evil is here then God must
be either not omnipotent or not benevolent. He can't be both powerful and good and have
a mess like this on his hands." Of course, the one thing that Professor Mill
overlooked was the concept of justice. If God is all good and all-powerful and He
is just and man violates that justice and God did not visit this planet with affliction
and with judgment, then we could say God is not good. You see the unspoken assumption is that God
somehow is morally responsible to give nothing but blessing to rebellious members of His
creation. But if God gave nothing but blessing to cosmic
traitors then God could hardly be thought to be good at all. This problem was wrestled with early on in
Old Testament history. We see it graphically in the book of Genesis
in the 18th chapter and this is the account of Abraham interceding for the judgment that
God threatens against the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let's look at the text and see the essence
of the story. Verse 20 of chapter 18 says this, "And the
Lord said, 'The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great and their sin is exceedingly
grave."' Let's get that established. God looked at Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities
that since their existence and destruction have come to be symbolic of all that is evil
in the world, but God evaluated Sodom and Gomorrah and He not only found wickedness
in Sodom and Gomorrah, not only was that wickedness deemed by the Judge of heaven and earth to
be a serious evil, again the language here is "a grave wickedness," but grave to the
superlative degree. Their wickedness was exceedingly grave, unspeakably
corrupt, was the judgment of God. And so God makes this pronouncement, "I will
go down now and see if they have done entirely according to its outcry which has come to
me and if not I will know." "And then the men turned away from there and
went towards Sodom while Abraham was still standing before the Lord. And Abraham came near and he said to God,
'Wilt thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?'" You get the question? God is threatening to rain down judgment upon
Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham has friends that lived there and he
said," God what are you going to do? Are you going to destroy innocent people? Are you going to punish the innocent, the
righteous, along with the wicked?" Now, I know that Abraham did not have the
benefit of New Testament theology. Abraham did not have the benefit of a contemporary
seminary education, but Abraham is considered the Father of the faithful in sacred Scripture
and we would expect that a man as close to God, a man as knowledgeable of the character
of God as Abraham was would have bitten his tongue before he asked such an insulting question
of the Almighty. Abraham suggests the possibility of the unthinkable
when he says to God, "God, are you going to destroy the innocent with the wicked?" And if ever was a theological lapse by the
giant of the faith, here it was. Abraham stuck his foot in his mouth big time
with that question. Wouldn't it be fundamentally unjust for God
to indiscriminately punish innocent people with guilty people? I remember when I was a child I went to school,
and one of the things I had real problems with was the teachers, were some some of the
disciplinary tactics that I experienced in school, disciplinary tactics that were effective,
I have to admit that. I remember one time David King, one of the
kids in our class set off a cherry bomb in the middle of study period when the teacher
had her back turned in a classroom with closed windows and wooden floors. When a cherry bomb goes off, you know that
is a big noise and poor Miss Husk, you know, broke the Guinness Book of Records for the
high jump when that cherry bomb went off and, of course, she turned around and she was furious. And she didn't know who had set off the cherry
bomb. And just like Capt. Queeg and his strawberries,
you know, she says, "All right, all right, who did it?" And everybody sits there like this, nobody
volunteers, nobody confesses to the crime. And she said, "I'll wait for the culprit to
confess." And the culprit wouldn't confess and so this
was the punishment she dished out. She said, "Alright, this whole class will
stay after school until somebody tells me who did this." Now, obviously more people knew who the guilty
party was, besides David King, but everybody that was sitting in front of David Kang the
moment the cherry bomb was released had no idea. Well, I shouldn't say they had no idea. Anybody in that classroom could have guessed
who would set off the cherry bomb, because they knew David King, and I'm sure Miss Husk
had him as her prime suspect. But these people didn't know. They were innocent and yet, she punished the
innocent with the guilty until somebody confessed. Ladies and gentlemen, that was effective,
but that taught me a lesson about injustice. My teacher communicated to me that she was
not concerned about justice, because she was willing to punish the innocent with the guilty. We do that in human society; God will not
do that. And Abraham certainly should've known that. "Will you use sweep away the righteous with
the wicked? Suppose, God there are fifty righteous within
the city, will you sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous
who are in it.?" Finally Abraham benefits from the philosophy
of the second glance. He takes a deeper breath and comes to his
senses. Now, he begins to talk like the hero of the
faith that we know that he is. He says in verse 25, "Far be it from Thee
to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and
the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from Thee!" Oh, Abraham good for you. The only problem is, Abraham, you don’t
have any idea how far it would be from God to do such a dreadful thing. And then Abraham utters another rhetorical
question. And this is a profoundly important verse. Listen, the last part of verse 25. "Shall not the Judge of all of the earth do
what is right?" That is the prime assumption of the biblical
concept of God and His justice, that this is one Judge, the supreme Judge, the Judge
of heaven and the earth, shall He not do what is right? Ladies and gentlemen, that's all God knows
how to do, because He is altogether righteous. And to be righteous, simply speaking, is to
do what is right. God always does what is right and Abraham
understood that, and that was the foundation for this almost humorous narrative of negotiations. Listen to how it goes. He says, "So the Lord said, 'If I find in
Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare the whole place on their account.'" Do you hear what He is saying here? God is saying, "Not only will I never ever,
ever, ever, ever punish the innocent with the wicked, but I'll, I'm even willing to
be gracious to the wicked for the sake of the innocent. If you can find, if I can find fifty righteous
people in Sodom and Gomorrah, I'll save the whole city. How's that, Abraham? Abraham said, "That's great!" And Abraham said, "But now, behold, I have
ventured to speak to the Lord, although I am but dust and ashes. Suppose the fifty are lacking, but five. Wilt Thou destroy the whole city because of
those five?" In other words, "God, if I can only find forty-five,
will you still be merciful?" God said, "Okay, I'll save the city if you
can find forty-five." And Abraham spoke to Him again and said, "Excuse
me, suppose forty are found there?" God said, "I won't do it on account of the
forty." Then Abraham said, "May the Lord not be angry,
and I shall speak. Suppose thirty are found there?" God said, "I won't do it if I find thirty." Abraham said once more, "Now behold, I have
ventured to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found?" God said, "I will not destroy it on account
of the twenty." And he said, "Please, may the Lord not be
angry and I shall speak only this once more. Suppose ten are found there?" And God said, "I will not destroy it on account
of the ten." "And as soon as He had finished speaking to
Abraham the Lord departed, and Abraham returned to his place," and you know the end of the
story. Even armed with the lamp of Diogenes, God
couldn't find ten righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah. And the judgment of the Lord fell upon those
cities. Will not the judge of all the earth do what
is right? Far be it from Him ever to punish the innocent
with the guilty. A few years ago, a book was written by a rabbi
in America that became a runaway bestseller and catapulted this man into national fame
and promise. He was on every talk show because he addressed
an issue that is a sore point with people, and the name of his book was When Bad Things
Happen to Good People. Do you remember that? When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Basically, Rabbi Kushner was addressing this
question. "Why is it that we see so many bad things
happen to good people?" In simple terms, this was the question John
Stuart Mill was wrestling with centuries ago. "Why does a good God allow bad things to happen
to good people?" Oh, how I wish my publisher would've asked
me to write that book, because it would've been the easiest book I would've ever undertaken
to write. If my publisher said, "R.C., we want you to
write a book entitled Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, I could finish the task in
less than a minute. I would title the book Why Bad Things Happen
to Good People, and then I'd pick up my pen and I would write on the page, "They don't!" That would be the end of my magnum opus, the
shortest book I've ever done. They don't. Bad things don't happen to good people, because
the Bible makes it very clear that there is none righteous, no not one, that judged by
the ultimate standard of God's goodness, it is a misnomer to credit humanity with the
epitaph "good." Do you remember the rich young ruler that
rushed to the feet of Jesus saying to him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal
life?" and Jesus stopped him in his tracks and said, "Hey, why do you call Me good? Only God is good." Okay? Now, we can say, relatively speaking, we know
that some people are more wicked than other people, even the psalmist in the ancient world
asked the question, "Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?" Why does it seem that the scales of justice
in this world of sinners, even in this world of sinners, is out of whack?” That there are some people that are ruthless
and cruel and corrupt and they, they make their way to fame and fortune over a group
of bodies that are strewn in their wake, and they seem to prosper, whereas people who are
trying, relatively speaking, to be conscientious and unselfish and helpful to their neighbor
are trampled down. We live in a topsy-turvy world where princes
walk in rags and beggars ride on horseback. That's the question, really, that is being
addressed here when we say, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Now, I've answered part of the question by
saying ultimately there are no good people, but what I'm about to get into now I think
you may find shocking and I'll ask you to put yourself on shockproof control for a few
moments until I finish this lest you become so shocked with what I'm about to say that
you won't even hear the explanation of it. Suppose in your wildest imagination, in your
dreams, that Jesus walked in here right now and came up to you and looked you in the eye
and said, "I'm going to make a promise to you, that for the rest of your days in this
world, I'm not going to allow anything bad to happen to you, that all that's going to
happen to you for the rest of your days will be good." How would you feel about that? You know, that's one of the reasons I can't
wait to get to heaven, because the Bible tells us that there's no evil in heaven, there's
no pain in heaven, there's no cancer in heaven, there's no suffering in heaven, there's no
death in heaven, there aren't even any tears in heaven. And this world in which I live now, there
is suffering, there is evil, there is pain, there's cancer, there's emotional distress,
there's loneliness. I remember when I was a little boy and I would
go out and I would get hurt and I would experience pain either emotional pain, somebody would
tease me, or make fun of me, or exclude me from a game and hurt my feelings, or if I
fall down and hit my head on a rock and my head would be bleeding and I would run home
crying crocodile tears pouring down my cheeks and how my mother would meet me in the kitchen
and she'd have her apron on and she would hug me and I would be sobbing, and you know
how little kids after they're done crying they can't breathe. They're gasping, and I would be gasping like
that and those tears would still be there and she would take the corner of her apron
and she would stoop over and she would wipe away my tears. That's one of the tenderest things that any
human being can do for another person, eh, to wipe away their tears? And it was comforting. It brought me consolation. And anytime pain happened, and she wasn't
there, I'm like any other kid in history, and my first cry was, "I want my mommy," because
my mommy was the one who could kiss it and make it go away, make it all better. But when my mom dried away my tears, they
would come back. The Bible says that in heaven God is going
to wipe away our tears, and when God wipes away our tears, it's the end of tears. We will never weep again from grief or sorrow
or sadness. And so on the one hand, we know that we are
living in a world that the Bible describes as a veil of tears. And so we really don't expect Jesus to walk
in here and say to us, "Whatever happened, you know only good is going come to pass in
your life for the rest of your day." Now, here comes the shocking, are you ready? We don't need to have Jesus walk in the room
and say to us that the only thing that could ever going to happen to you for the rest of
your life are good things, because He's already said it. Let me say it again, we don't have to fantasize
about Jesus walking in here and saying to you personally, I have to qualify it, if you
are a Christian, we don't have to fantasize God coming here and saying to you who are
a believer, who are Christian, that nothing bad will ever happen to you the rest of your
life on this planet because He's already said it. You say, "Are you out of your mind, R.C. Sproul? Are you crazy?" In like manner God has already said in so
many words to the unbeliever, "Nothing that ever happens to you will be good. Everything that happens to you will be a tragedy." Is that shocking! Let me explain it. I know it's shocking. And you know that the Bible says be careful
of people, flee from people who have the audacity to call good, evil or evil, good. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make a distinction here that
the Bible makes between what I'm going to call "the proximate" and "the ultimate." The proximate is that which is here in this
proximity. It is close at hand. It is near and is part of our experience. I'm referring to the human level of things,
the earthly level. The horizontal plane in which we live every
day, on that plane, on the proximate plane of human existence we deal with bad things
every day. Sin is bad. Pain is bad. Suffering is bad. The death of a loved one is tragic to us. And the Bible doesn't try to sugarcoat that
and the Bible doesn't try to say that evil is simply an illusion and you have to pretend
that it doesn't exist. No, no, no, no. It strongly affirms the stark-naked reality
of pain and suffering, affliction and grief and tribulation. And the Bible says, "In the world you will
have tribulation." But a verse in Scripture that the has been
voted as the most popular verse in the New Testament among Christians is Romans 8:28. What does Romans 8:28 say? Let me read it for you briefly, "And we know,"
do we? That's apostolic optimism. "And we know that God causes all things to
work together for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to
His purpose." We all know that verse, don't we? "All things work together for good for those
who love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose." You memorized that years ago, right? Well, at first blush that seems to say to
us, "Okay, there are all kinds of things in the proximate realm that happen to us that
are bad. But God stands over and above that proximate
realm. God is on the vertical plane transcending
this horizontal veil of tears in which we live, and He has the power to take every bad
thing that happens to you and make it contribute ultimately to your good, doesn't He? Isn't that what that verse is saying? Well, think about it for a minute. If ultimately all of these proximate miseries
and tragedies and griefs and sufferings and bad things that we experience are taking place,
if ultimately God is using these things to bring them about for good, than QED, ladies
and gentlemen, ultimately, ultimately, it is good that they have happened to us. Do you see that? Ultimately, it is good that they happen to
us, that the heavenly Father never allows anything to happen to you that is not for
your ultimate good. If we could believe that, we could face anything. I wrote a book on suffering called Surprised
by Suffering. I chose that title on purpose, because in
this day and age there's a brand of Christianity that I believe is a serious distortion of
biblical Christianity, that goes about the world teaching people that God only wills
health and prosperity for people and that all of the sorrow and the pain in the grief
and death and all of that is a result of the devil's work among us, as if the devil had
the power ultimately to frustrate the sovereign authority of God. I listened to a talk show one day where this
the minister on television was interviewing a couple that had gone through a serious tragedy,
their child had been killed or something and they were trying to be heroic in their Christian
testimony and say even though, you know, it's like Job, "Though He slays me, yet will I
trust Him," and they were going through all these things and they said they still trust
God in spite of this dreadful calamity that had befallen them and the pastor was trying
to comfort them and he said, "We know that God doesn't have anything to do with death,
that God has nothing to do with suffering." That's basically the idea that Rabbi Kushner
was saying. Kushner is saying God's not responsible for
the pain and the sorrow and the affliction and suffering and death in this world. He'd like to be a help out, but the universe
is structured in such a way that the deity's hands are tied, He's merely a grieving spectator
of the whole mess. But as I watched that program and I listened
to that pastor say God has nothing whatsoever to do with death, I wanted to scream. God has everything to do with death. Now, I understand, friends, that the pastor
was trying to bring comfort. He didn't want the people to be blaming God
for the sin, for the sorrow, for the grief, for the disease and suffering and death, and
so they were trying to absolve God for any blame so that we would think well of God,
and bringing comfort. But if the person thought that through, they
would realize that that's like an empty cloud. That a God who has nothing whatsoever to do
with death is no comfort whatsoever to me. The message of the Bible is, "Yea, though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with
me." God majors in suffering. He redeems the world through suffering. The pathway of our Lord is the Via Dolorosa,
the road of grief. It is through suffering that our redemption
is accomplished, beloved! God majors in suffering. And to say that He has nothing to do with
it is to take all hope away from us. I wrote a book entitled Surprised By Suffering,
as I said, and I used that title because people have come to believe this idea that God has
nothing to do with suffering and so when Christians experience grief, when the doctor tells the
Christian that they have terminal cancer, when the policeman comes to the door of your
home in the middle of the night and tells you that your child has just been killed in
a traffic accident, that's suffering. And we're shocked, and we're surprised. "This should not be happening to me, I'm a
Christian!" But what does the Bible say? "Think it not strange when you are visited
with manifold afflictions." The Bible never promises that Christians will
not suffer. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd just read it
once, you'll see that the Bible promises that we will suffer, but with that promise is the
promise of God's triumph in our suffering, God's triumph over our suffering, God's triumph
through our suffering, God working over and above. This ultimate should be reversed and put up
here in control over the proximate, so that all things work together for good to those
who love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose. In that book, Surprised By Suffering, I have
a chapter that I've had I don't how many radio interviews about this chapter. Everybody that wants to ask me about this
book, asks me about this chapter and the chapter's entitled, I think it's title, the theme of
the chapter is "suffering as a vocation." As a vocation! You know when I took my vocational counseling
examination in my multiple choice, career options survey, suffering wasn't one of the
things that I checked. What do you mean suffering as a vocation? What I mean is this, that in everybody's life
at some point the call of God, and that's what a vocation is, a call. The call of God on your life is to suffer. Bob Griese's in the Hall of Fame; standing
quarterback Super Bowl champion, Miami Dolphins. His wife endured the lingering death from
cancer in which she suffered for ten years as a Christian. I was in their home towards the end of that
experience. And I sat with Judi Griese and held her hands
as she wept and she said to me, "R.C., I can't take any more, I just can't. Where's God?" What can I say to her! You know, "God works all things together,
be of good cheer." No. I just said, "Judi, I don't know what to say." Three days later she died. And on that day, she was cured of her cancer
as she went to be with the Lord. I don't know what God's purpose was in that,
but it was holy, and I know if the doctor tells me that I'm going to have to spend several
years in agony and in torture, I'm not looking forward to that. I don't want to ever hear that. I hope that I can die in my sleep. I hope that I can be spared so much of the
pain and the anguish that is a normal lot of the human race. But the last thing that I ever want to hear,
ladies and gentlemen, if I am stricken with a dreadful disease is that my suffering is
for nothing. That it happens by chance, that I'm just an
unfortunate accident victim. I know if I ever have to face that that the
only way I'll be able to get through it is to go to God and say, "God, I don't know why
You have visited me with this, but if this is Your call on my life, then I'll be able
to survive it. I'll be able to endure it." Because if I know that it is God's purpose
for me to do it, then I will know that the reason for it, beloved, is all together good. Now, I said in passing that every tragedy
for the Christian is ultimately a blessing. That doesn't deny the reality of the tragedy
at this level, but ultimately every tragedy in your life is a blessing and every blessing
that the pagan receives from the hand of God for which that pagan does not respond in gratitude
and repentance before God increases his guilt before God. Every good and perfect gift that God gives
to an unbeliever. that that unbeliever refuses to praise God
for, becomes an occasion for judgment ultimately. So that ultimately all of those blessings
are tragedies for the one who does not repent. But again, for the one who loves God, for
the one who has a vocation, for the one who is called according to His purpose, everything,
everything, works together for good. "For will not the Judge of all the earth do
what is right?"
