Where is God in a Coronavirus World? | Online Conversation with Dr. John Lennox

[Music] for all of us all around the world this has certainly been an uncertain and often fearful time in some places such as Italy Spain in New York City the scale and the density of the misery is hard to fathom for many people the severity of the suffering has felt like too much to bear and it all makes us wonder where is God in all of this our guest today dr. John Linux has tackled that question quite directly in a deeply thoughtful new book entitled where is God in a coronavirus world which has already been translated into more than 20 different languages and disseminated worldwide in which we've invited him here today to discuss with us dr. John Linux is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University and an internationally renowned speaker on the relationship between science philosophy and religion he is also an incredibly prolific author and public intellectual and the author of such books as God's Undertaker his science buried God God and Stephen Hawking seven days that divided the world and among many others can science explain everything in addition to his books he has published more than 70 different mathematical treatises and the co-author of two different research level texts in algebra as part of the Oxford mathematical monograph series and I am very proud to say he is also a senior fellow of the Trinity forum dr. Lennox welcome thank you very much I'm honoured and delighted to be part of this and good evening afternoon or morning to all of you well we're really glad to have you here so your book was clearly a labor of love but also a labor of real urgency you have written this published this got in a translate to more than 20 different languages since the start of the pandemic why did you feel so compelled to write it partly because I'm a mathematician and when I saw that this was going to grow exponentially and mathematicians tend to know about exponential growth I felt impelled to think about doing something about it now I'm old I'm in my mid seventies my wife and I are locked down as vulnerable adults and I thought can I do anything because I can't go out so I simply sat down on a Monday morning and thought can I speak into this not offering simplistic answers because there aren't any but perhaps trying in a modest way to help people think about the big questions that covered 19 raises so I wrote furiously all day long for a week and on the Saturday evening I sent it off to a publisher who hadn't seen it before and by the following Wednesday it was printed and so it went on for that from there with the language being added every day or so so I very thrilled with this in a lot of countries of course it's been put on free of charges in eBook so hundreds of thousands of them have gone even into Chinese and Russian and languages like that so yes I just felt that perhaps there was something we're saying in the name of Christianity so this is a broad question but we are living in a fearful time you know we face a virus for which there is no known cure or vaccine which is highly contagious and easily transmitted often lethal in its course and it's also exposed in many ways both our insufficiencies as people and the shortcomings of our governments how do we live faithfully amidst unavoidable fear others of course as we all know a very difficult question because to live in scary situations you've got to have inner resources and you've got to have some sort of dimension to get a great wealth that's outside yourself and this of course is where Christianity comes right into the center but it doesn't offer to take the DS away except in the hands of competent doctors and all the rest of it and I admire them immensely risking their lives for the rest of us but what it does offer is a relationship that if we understand it correctly the relationship of Christ through trusting him and his death and particularly resurrection covered 19 can't touch that and I mean that quite sincerely I might die of covered 19 on a shopping trip I might catch it and because of underlying health problems it would probably kill me but what helps me to face it not understand at all not solve all the problems and we talk about those later but what helps me face it is the confidence that I have a relationship that actually transcends death and this is a very big thing throughout your book you repeatedly mentioned that we as Christians worship a God who suffers why is that so significant and important well if you watch the reactions of people and I watch them very carefully I was first introduced to this kind of thing on a smaller scale but it meant a lot to the people who were involved I arrived in New Zealand just a couple of days after the Christchurch earthquake and all the people wanted to talk about was earthquakes why and I had to face these questions and I noticed that there are two distinct sets of questions there are the intellectual questions which are often but not always asked by people who are watching the suffering but then there are the people who are actually experiencing the suffering and very often their questions our relationship our relational they're emotional they have deep pastoral needs they want a touch they want a hug and so on and one of the things that has really moved me in recent days is the story of a tiny family Mary Martha and Lazarus that John's Gospel tells us about where he got some disease and the sisters who knew Jesus wrote a letter and said the one you love is ill and of course they expected him to come he didn't come and they watched their brother die now here's where it becomes very relevant to our current situation he stayed at a distance and that raises a deep question is God in quarantine is he isolating himself is he maintaining her social distance or does he just not exist but when Jesus eventually came sister Martha met him and said Lord have you'd been here my brother wouldn't have died they had no question about his power but the question was about his willingness which is another question we hear about today and Jesus looked at her and said Martha your brother will rise again oh yes he said I know that of the last day and they started on a pretty deep theological discussion about the resurrection but then Mary came and she said exactly the same words lord have you'd been here my brother wouldn't have died and then she burst out crying Jesus didn't start a discussion with her he wept too and I really think that this teaches us the breadth of the heart of God that Jesus was prepared to talk and answer the big questions but he was also prepared to weep of course a cynic would say aren't those crocodile tears no because he was about to go to the cross for them and you asked about suffering at the heart of Christianity and it is at the heart of Christianity and I've often said to people you know if Jesus really is the son of God then what's God doing in a cross to put it fairly quickly it certainly is telling me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but he's become part of it now that is a window in that doesn't solve anything but it reveals the heart of God and I want to follow that because that if that is what God is like then perhaps there is in the end some way of getting to grips with this that doesn't let go of the love of God and his compassion you know one of the coolest aspects of Corona of course is the way that it isolates and of course an isolation is its own form of suffering and in many ways the people who are the most sick and the most fearful are those who are most cut off you know perhaps from the perception of God's love but also from the reality of other human contact and I'm confident we have some of those folks watching today who have Corona and are isolated what would you say to them well one of the things that I have found challenging about this is precisely that and a couple of weeks ago I thought look you're locked in but you have a telephone and you have the internet why don't you sit and carefully think of people that you haven't talked to for years and who might welcome a visit in that way and it was very interesting it was actually quite a baracy because the first person I phoned up said why are you contacting me after all these years and I apologized but at the end of the conversation he said look this has really made my day thank you so much for thinking of me and I think it's something that we can do if we're fit and well is to reach out to people particularly those people who we think or we know our suffering are are threatened with this and talk to them and speak to them and perhaps do a Skype call so that they can see us and I really feel that many other people of course are doing this and they are massively encouraging people no that doesn't cure people but it certainly gives a human presence and one of the things that's encouraged me about the response of people of all faiths and none is the increase in neighborliness and offering to help and we've been very impressed with neighbors who said you want your shopping done you shouldn't risk going to shop and all this kind of stuff but that's only a little thing to say to people that are suffering but there again I would want in that sense for them to be like either Martha or Mary and go back to some of the scriptures that have encouraged people it's no accident that through the centuries people have derived huge comfort from the Psalms of David often written from depths of deep trouble the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death and some of you I'm talking to may be doing that you are with me your rod and your staff they comfort me and to remind ourselves if we're Christians particularly and if we're not to think about it that Jesus offers to be the shepherd who guide us not only in the wonderful places but in their very difficult and shadowy and dark places one of the things I really appreciated about your your book dr. Lennox is that you did tackle some of those difficult intellectual questions that you mentioned earlier and you waited right into theodicy and in some ways engaged the most difficult parts of theodicy it's easy enough to basically draw a line between man's wrongdoing and the evil consequences that result it seems much harder to grapple with natural evils yes and the the predations and dark cruelties that seem to be baked into the natural order the fact that Corona isolates as it suffocates the moth that are the wasp that lays its eggs inside the moth and the larvae basically eat their way out as they hatch how are we to understand the love of a Creator God when so much cruelty and seeming ugliness is baked into the heart of the natural world this is the hardest question that anybody faces whatever their worldview we all face it because we all see two things we see beauty in one hand I looked at the Orion Nebula through my telescope the other night spectacular and then I come in then the news is on and it's an intensive care ward with the camera turned away because people are choking to death and you're absolutely right this is the central hard question you're also right and it's perceptive to note that somehow we find it easier to deal with moral evil than we do with what is almost an oxymoron natural evil because evil is a moral concept but I'll come to that in a moment and it is very difficult to cope with especially when you realize that the things that are causing the trouble are generically vital to human life what I mean by that is there are millions of viruses and we need them very few are pathogenic they're essential to life and I met this a New Zealand because I discovered reading up on plate tectonics and earthquakes I discover that the plate tectonics the motion of those great plates on which the consonants it is essential to give us oxygen in the atmosphere so without them we wouldn't exist and similarly with viruses the thing is that something fractures not only moral nature but fractures physical nature now people make different things of the biblical story but I often say it's worth listening to it to see if it makes any sense and very briefly and we can't go in the vast detail of it but it doesn't matter because the point can be made simply what scripture says is right at the beginning there was a connection between moral evil and physical damage that when human beings with the wonderful gift that God has given all of us the ability to choose and that enables us to make relationships it means we're in a moral universe and all the rest of it and if I could just pause there many people say to me why didn't God make a world in which there was no good and no evil well I say of course he could have done that in fact you could make a world like that full of robots and automata that are neither good nor evil but why do you want to wish yourself out of existence and they say to me what I said yes you're wishing yourself out of existence because the world you want to live in wouldn't have you in it because you are a wonderful human being made in the image of God capable of making relationships and the problem with that is as Lewis pointed out a long time ago that if you're capable of love you're capable of hate human beings rebelled against God they didn't believe in his word and they introduced sin and rebellion into the world and what happened through that had a physical consequence the deepest one was human death and Paul puts it this way as through one man sin entered into the world of death through sin and so death passed upon all human beings but then if you read the story carefully you will see that God told them what the consequence would be there would be grain there would be food but also thorns and thistles and I suspect it could have included earthquakes uncovered 19 there's a connection of fracture in human nature that has led to a fracture and physical nature now this raises questions about the nature of God which you have said and how I look at it is perhaps a little too simplistic but I didn't engineer it it's not my fault that the worlds in this mess and it's not yours either it started millennia before we were born now if God turned round and said okay you're expected to put it right by yourself then I would begin to complain seriously but here I see a way of understanding the Christian message that begins to get our sense of proportion right because the Christian good news is that precisely because this thing is much bigger than you are started long before you existed that God has decided to do something to put it right and the whole message is not of humans trying desperately to merit acceptance by God but it's of God reaching down to us and coming into our world and doing something whereby we can receive His forgiveness peace with God new life and a new power to live not through our merit but simply as a gift of grace and so the problem is balanced by the nature of the solution now that deserves unpacking heaven in a lot of detail but that's roughly how I begin to tackle it now I know there are all kinds of side questions but that would be the start our feeling will be getting as some of those side questions and the Q&A I think we will but let me ask you as well I think unfortunately it is fair to say that the public perception of Christians and the church response to Coba at least in the United States wouldn't be primarily characterized as that of extending hope at least in terms of the way it's portrayed you hear much more about churches that refuse to close pastors who claim that God will protect them shortly before becoming infected and the like what should the church do to extend hope what should we as individuals do to show the love of God's neighbor well of course I'm speaking to you from the United Kingdom and what we've noticed here is something that we last saw in wartime and that is that the virtual churches are packed full of people they reckoned last week that 25 percent of the nation here turned and listened to a church service now that's amazing because we've only got about five percent of church attendance you have a lot more than that in the United States and it's difficult for me because not living there I don't experience those kind of reactions what I do experience the pastor's I know and the church ministers are making every effort to reach out and they're having services every day and they're trying to answer the big questions and they're reporting an absolutely marvelous response now I know in some places there are problems because sometimes professing Christians can be very judgmental and they react to this whole thing of saying how well God's judging us are judging this nation or judging those people and I don't know whether you want me to speak about that because it's I think it's quite important would you like me to say something about that sure because there's an incident in the New Testament that is very helpful and I'm very cautious on this business of judgment and I'll tell you why Jesus was once on the Temple Mount where the temple wasn't Jerusalem and somebody of the crowd says this is the very place Lord where Pilate came and massacred with his soldiers a group of worshipers now that's moral evil yes he said and do you think they were worse than anybody else I tell you they weren't and then very interestingly he introduced another incident that happened elsewhere in Jerusalem and he said what about the 18 people the the Tower of Siloam fell on you think they were worse than anybody else in Jerusalem at the time I tell you they were not now here we have what the theologians call a Dominical utterance about victims of catastrophes now I know only a teen were killed but the principle is exactly the same and I think the message is very clear when you see a tragedy large or small whether it's moral evil or natural evil don't think that the victims are necessarily worse than anybody else now this is a very important thing to learn but Jesus didn't finish there what he said turning to the crowd he said except you all repent you shall likewise perish now of course he didn't mean that you have a choice of the way to die either you'd be massacred in church or at our full fall on you but I think what he meant was that these things act an encoding Lewis no like God's megaphone wake up now here we are in Europe we've neglected God increasingly for centuries the word God doesn't appear in our Constitution of the European Union and this is acting as a wake-up call because you can't see death on this scale without thinking about death and you can't think about death without thinking about eternity about God it raises all the big questions and I think there's a there's a connection people are turning to listen and watch and hear things about God in the virtual world because they want an answer to the big question so that's the first thing be very careful with judgment now of course God sent plagues and people say yes he sent plagues in the Old Testament there you are that's his judgment I'd say careful again we have scripture telling us what those were so far as I know there's no scripture about common 19 or pandemics in the modern world and final point I'd make is this that we've been here before and a far worse scale but most people don't know it they reckon some people reckon the Black Death of the 14th century killed 200 million people wiped out a large percentage of Europe but the most interesting one perhaps is one of the earliest ones were the Emperor was amazed at the Christian response why because they not only looked after their own people the Christians they went at great risks of themselves and they looked after pagan people now this is a legacy that we need to focus on because of course that was the beginning of hospices and hospitals and they're all a Christian legacy as people like rugby stark and pointed out and others in recent years and it's very important to factor that in the response of Christians to that kind of need and I think that goes some way to redressing the balance but not the whole way you mentioned death a little bit earlier and of course one of the one of the challenges of kovat of corona is that it not only reveals our vulnerabilities but it also reveals our own mortality in maintenance over a hundred thousand people in the United States have already died in the course of doing a little bit of research for our conversation I read that you had a narrow brush with death about a decade ago and so I wanted to ask you for people who are fearful and for people who may be possibly facing death how did you prepare for death how does one prepare for death well of course it's a very personal thing and if you don't mind me sharing something personal I'm happy to do it I can only say how I responded I had very little time because I'd had a bit of warning with pain and my heart as it turned out I was taken at a hospital they sent behold they thought it could be cured with medicine the pain got worse and suddenly I was rushed in an ambulance and the next thing I heard was a young doctor saying we're losing him and they actually ran with me on a trolley to the operating theatre and fortunately there there was a surgeon there and at the door of the theatre I said goodbye to my wife I've been married over 50 years I said goodbye to her because it seemed there was absolutely no hope and the door closed behind me and I went in and they started the operation and the doctor said look he said there's no blood coming through your right coronary artery please be quiet I I'm going to have to operate very rapidly in those dead silence for 40 minutes and then he bent over me and he said Professor Linux I don't know what to say to you you should be dead that were his first words and I said really yes he said I don't understand why you're not dead but your heart hasn't even been damaged didn't go home tomorrow which was amazing now what I want to report and this is just what happened to me is this I had complete peace and that was astonishing because it wasn't just an intellectual piece that I knew whatever it was a sense of calm of knowing where I was going of knowing that the Lord who may have walked with for many years now since my teenage wasn't going to let me down so I'm thankful for that but there's a codicil to it you see it almost the same time my sister who had a lovely daughter of 22 just married to a youth pastor she got a brain tumor and it killed her so it's all very well for me to be thankful that my life was saved and I've been given another dozen years that have been very productive but that wasn't true for my sister and if we are going to get these things right sense of proportion I've not only got to be thankful for myself I've got uh something to say to people who do lose loved ones in this way or lose their own lies but all I can say is well it's not an oil it's a very important thing is that the Lord has promised to be near us when we're in situations he hasn't always promised to tell us everything beforehand it's a bit like where he told the disciples that if the world hates me it's gonna hate you but don't worry what you're going to say because they're not our adored be given to you now he wasn't giving them an excuse not to prepare a talk this is when you're suddenly caught right and you're put into the court and you don't really know what to do how should I respond he said I'm gonna make you in the situation and I think that's what I experienced and therefore I would expect that you can generalize that that the Lord meets us in our need and on the cross if you say where was God in the middle of the suffering well he was there suffering and that is a message for our heart so we can't explain it all or rationalize at all in that sense but it has a huge and deep and important comforting emotional impact that we need thanks dr. Lennox during this last half-hour of our program we're going to take questions from our viewers and there's a bunch lined up as Alissa said earlier you can not only ask a question you can also like a question and the more likes a question has the more likely it will be to be asked to our speakers so our first question comes from Michael Lundy who quotes some verses from Isaiah and then says how can we be less alarmist and more Christian about our inevitable mortality in God's control of it without being complacent or reckless again that's a difficult and a very good question because we swings and roundabouts um it was large to large extent got to do with our temperament how we react but we live in a society that tries to often play down death we're familiar with it at movies there's endless death and we get in your to it it has no real significance the the goodie gets away with them the baddies get killed at least that's what it was when I watched cowboys and Indians nearly a century ago but we're aware of that there's plenty of death but there's very little analysis of death and you know something that has struck me about this coronavirus is when we look at the media we get what well in our country we have only two kinds of people that appear politicians and medics there are no thinkers there are no philosophers there are no atlases there are no theologians there are no people speaking into this and say no look folks the medics have told us that were mortal the politicians are trying the best to protect us but what are these things really mean it's a forensic kind of scientific analysis that goes on the basis of statistics and leaves out all the important questions of meaning now you ask how can we avoid being complacent or alarmist I think that also we live to God of the more we soak our minds and the balance of the health of Scripture the better we will be equipped to deal with that and the second thing I would say is this constant interaction with individuals I do a lot in public I speak to large groups of people particularly in the US over the last few years for the Veritas forum and the Trinity forum indeed and it's one thing to talk to large crowds but I think what powers whatever little power I've got in public it from engagement in listening to people's heartbeat I was told when I was a child that I had two ears and one mouth and that I should try to use them in that proportion and I played Socrates all my life asking people questions and trying to get them to reveal what's going on and some of us we have to battle with our temperament we can be cockeyed optimist and right over the feelings of more sensitive people and we need to learn look people were talking to may have different presuppositions in their background and their lives and we need to learn to see them as people now the only way to do that is to listen to them so it's all bound up with our approach to our fellow human beings and then to translate that if we get opportunity in the public space to translate it and to come across with sympathy Jesus was often firm with people but he could be very sensitive and understanding and I covered that so our next question comes from an anonymous attendee who asked is God using the coded 919 play as one more warning of severe mercy to call us back to him well that's certainly a possible interpretation and when I referred earlier to CS Lewis and I did it carefully I pointed out that this kind of thing appears to act as God's megaphone that's how it functions we can see that actually happening and when I put that together with the incident I referred to on the mountain the temple mountain they question of the falling of the tower and were these people any worsen and so on Jesus gave a warning on the basis of it except you all repent you shall likewise perish so he's saying you're mortal you're vulnerable you're weak look an invisible untrackable microbe is killing people and if that's not a wake-up to think about God I don't know what is so in that sense that is a consequence of this you see when you use the words is God using it you need to be careful I think with what people take from that because the next step up is to say this is the deterministic world and God causes it and I think that denies both the love of God and the way in which he's constituted us of course God is the creator he's built the universe in which this is possible so he allows it but to think that God directly causes it I think we end up in a moral abyss in fact morality disappears so our next question is also from an anonymous attendee who asked how can we be a light to those around us suffering from the mental and emotional effects of koban 19 and she'll care for those dealing with increased depression and anxiety I always find generic questions difficult and so do you all because those around us suffering mental depression every person is an individual and the vast variety of responses of depressions now I'm not criticizing question it's a very real question and my heart goes out to people but you can only help people that you know and you can only help them to a certain extent what I what I mean by that is this sometimes these reactions traumatic mental emotional responses and depressions sometimes they need medical intervention and one of the things people who are involved in in pastor ministry learned very early on is how to tell whether a person actually needs medical help has this thing from wise advice and you get examples in Scripture of people that got very depressed Elijah is the most famous one perhaps he saw a huge spiritual victory over the prophets of bail and then Jezebel she must have been absolutely terrified because she got after his life and he started to run and he ran I believe more than a marathon and then he sat down under a tree and he said I'm the only one left I'm worse than my father's and they wish to die he got suicidal but God spoke to us said Elijah actually you're wrong you're not the only one left and secondly he sent an angel who woke the man up and gave him some food and drink told him to go back to sleep and then told him to take a holiday now I'm caricaturing slightly but sometimes people get themselves stressed out and what they need to hear is not some gloomy and analysis of their depression but someone to say look are you getting enough fresh air have you had enough sleep Ari practical coming alongside perhaps you're not eating enough you've got so worried or you're so frightened of comedy that you're not shopping and getting food well perhaps there are other people that can do that but there's a vast spectrum of reasons and so I find the question generically utterly impossible to answer as you will but if we're confronted with a single person or family we can try to explore with them exactly what it is that's that's bothering them and well and worrying them and we can think and pray about it and try and help we certainly want to sit won't solve the problems of all the world that's that's for sure so our next question comes a rocker Roger trigging who says that it's difficult from a scientific point of view to explain a connection between moral evil and natural evil could dr. Lennox say a bit more about this well I can give you an example in the covered 19:9 this depends on top-level medical information coming from the World Health Organization how did it start well according to some top experts they tell me that it started in a food market where wild animals are sold for consumption now think about that why did that happen well when you confine a wild animal away from its habitat and put it into a cage it gets stressed and stressed animals excrete and they excrete vast billions of viruses and so this virus jumped from animals to humans at least that's the theory and there's a fair bit of evidence for it now why were those animals taken out of their habitat human greed people wanting to make a lot of money because they're very expensive regarded as delicacies so we have a very complex situation now because clearly the people that bought those animals or were good to sell and make a profit we can't blame them for infecting the whole world as if it was a deliberate act but it seems that they're that moral evil could be connected with a catastrophe at the natural level that followed it and that happens all the time people want wood so they stripped the Amazon forest and they sell the wood that leads to desertification it can lead to a whole tribe dying out of starvation so you've got the natural disaster following the moral disaster and and therefore it seems to me that there's a very close connection and a moment's thought will show that it's all over the place so this next question comes from Ray Carter who asked you feel the church today is less prepared to deal with a pandemic and as far as anxiety in fear ago than pandemics of the past have the comforts of Western civilization and the disease hired to maintain a certain standard of living caused us to be unable to or less likely to suffer well when suffering does come I can imagine that's true of some people again it's a generic question the church well the church is composed of many churches which are composed of individuals and I don't have that kind of bird's-eye overview or helicopter view of all the churches I couldn't judge that but I can see that there is a real danger we thought many of us that something like this could never happen again we look back to the Middle Ages the bubonic plague the Black Death and we discovered that that was carried by rats and we sorted that out and many of the major plagues have been eradicated we didn't think we'd be there again because medicine has got rid of all those things so now suddenly with a bang we're right in the middle of it again and clearly the danger of our kind of civilization if we can imagine what it must have been like to live in the 14th century with wars going on all around with no anesthetics or CS Lewis once pointed out and living in those conditions was absolute misery compared with the lives that many of us have lived today and there is a danger in the noise of modern Western swinging life that we don't hear the still small voice of God and therefore we're not as prepared as we should be we're not as engaged as we should be and you know the title of my book where is God in the coronavirus world depending on who asks me I sometimes say tell me where was God in your world before the coronavirus hit where was he did you know him were you looking for him have you experience of him where was the bed and then I quietly say he's in the coronavirus world exactly what he was before that is prepared if you towards him prepared to offer you his salvation but he will break his way into your life he's waiting for you to respond and so it's very easy to imagine that the questioner is is right we're weren't prepared but how do we respond to that what'll I do about it and I think the most important thing these days is that a certain complacency which occurs in some places has introduced another fear particularly in the Christians lives and that is the fear of communicating what they believe in the public space or even in the private space and indeed I was so concerned about that that if you don't mind me making another advertisement I wrote a little book last year called have no fear and it's the fear of engagement with our neighbors to spread this message that could well have the effect of us being better prepared in the future and much more realistic so our next question comes from Friedrich Hoffs of Germany who says corona has shown us once again how unpredictable a highly analog and digital networked world has become the uncertainty and anxiety of this also characterizes many entrepreneurs because of all of their forecasting tools no longer work we're facing a major recession how can Christians and churches restore confidence in the public space after faith has often become a purely private affair well I'm delighted to hear from somebody in Germany Greece is ihab sleeker hast for the curtain that's later enjoyed spoken of a vividness nice it's lovely to just hear somebody from a neighboring country and one that I know very well and this is a huge concern and job losses in Airlines and the travel in depth trade my own son in a situation where he's now been furloughed and he doesn't know what's gonna happen he's in sales so these things hit right at home we're not only facing the results of the pandemic we're also in the context of your question facing the rise of artificial intelligence and the jobs that are being replaced at a great speed where one machine is doing the work of ten people now that is a very worrying thing even if we hadn't the pandemic to be concerned about but here again it's a generic question and you'd be very bored here he'd be constantly say the same thing but it's impossible to give an answer to that except that I suspect I'm speaking to quite a few people who are in senior positions and one of the most marvelous things that some of you folks in business and industry are doing is something I've never really been able to do myself and that is to give employment to people I admire you greatly for doing that I have been a mathematician and an academic and and so was employed by a university and the only people I'd given employment to are an occasional gardener that some of you have taken the entrepreneurial risk and created jobs sometimes for thousands of people and this is a wonderful of god-given ability and I think the question is best addressed by captains of industry and so on who live with integrity and they want to give jobs to people and they find it painful to have to make folks redundant oh they have to do that sometime and I think those are the people you need to have on a webinar like this to give you real answers from their own experience Richard miles ask our next question which is the term sin and evil are rarely used nowadays with respect to human behavior does this contribute to our difficulty in understanding natural evil oh I think it does I I think it does people will avoid sin like a plague if you don't mind me putting it that way and I'm not trying to be facetious they will say anything but use the word sin and they'll say I made a mistake or I got it wrong at all this kind of stuff but sin because sin is not only a moral term it's really a theological term all have sinned and come short of the glory of God and it's very interesting if you mentioned sin in a conversation I'll bet that people instantly think about the God question and and therefore talking about it I remember hearing a lecture at which a student stood up in a very famous university and asked the speaker who will remain nameless it wasn't me and I have no idea what sin is and the speaker looked at it and then looked at the audience and said here's a man that doesn't know what sin is have you ever met one before and of course it brought the house side everybody knows what it is but they don't like to bring the implications and therefore I do believe that although it's difficult to put these concepts across from the position of Christianity because they're so unfamiliar I think we have a job to educate people in every field of endeavor there are words that you have to learn in mathematics many of them in medicine even more and in all disciplines we have to learn words so when it comes to dealing with God there are terms we need to learn about what are they mean sin repentance and so on but they need to be unpacked on and explained and the difficulty is we can easily develop a jargon mentality where we live in our own little ghetto and we use words that people I'd say don't we need to explain them so we'll try to get in to more questions and the next comes from Nik Buckner who says or who asked how does the dull and drawn-out nature of this crisis change how we endure it and ultimately find meaning in it well whether you find meaning in it is a moot point to find meaning through it and to find meaning while we're in it is another altogether now again I'm finding a lot of meaning while I'm going through it but it's not meaning in it its meaning and all the things that I'd been given time to reflect about including the Christian response to it and I think what is very important that is if we can do it and again it's so hard for me to speak I don't know you as an individual or what your circumstance is although I've every sympathy with the question is I would want to ask what are you doing to have a meaningful day by day existence in spite of what is happening and if we spend all our time as many young people are sadly doing playing video games or watching television well we can get some interesting knowledge from TV but doing something creative some people haven't read books for years to read a few books to think about things to contact people to discuss these matters to read famous literature the deals with this kind of a problem that would be one way but you not necessarily find meaning in it but the question is can I find meaning file I am enduring it so this last question comes from Alessandro to taro who said a friend said to me quote my mother was a Christian she loved Jesus and now she is dead because of Corona the family could not go visit her in the hospital she was only 60 years old Widing god help her is this the justice of God mr. Linux what would you answer to his question well I would say of course I don't know what is behind what God does but that question can be asked of every death my sister losing her daughter of 22 she's a lot less than 60 and for all those years she's had to ask that big question now she's come through it and she's accepted that for some inscrutable reason you see if I believe that death was the end then I would have nothing to say to you absolutely nothing but you see there was a lady that loved Jesus I suspect if you could see her now you wouldn't ask the question anymore in the sense that what she is enjoying in the presence of God now will be infinitely more glorious now you are suffering the loss and I appreciate that I remember losing my dad and my mum and those are very real events but the thing that I cling onto is whatever age they were is that I'm gonna see them again because we are one in Christ so take that that loss that sense of loss and take it to the Lord and you'll find that with time as you work through it you may be able to be a huge comfort to other people because there are many people going through the same thing and their parents didn't leave lived to 60 they may have died much younger I know this is hard and I suspect the person was right who said when we get to glory and look back and look at the other side of the tapestry that our lives have been weaving we'll see things in a totally different light you see I've written a book where's God in the coronavirus world my my answers aren't exact and I have huge numbers of questions folks if I were to die in the next few weeks of covered 19 I would go into eternity with masses of questions there's lots of stuff I don't know but I know someone who is the answer and I've seen enough evidence in him and what he's done that I can trust him with the things I don't completely understand well the last word in my book was suggested to me by a doctor and it's attributed to the great 19th century preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon God is too good to be unkind and he is too wise to be mistaken and when we cannot trace his hand we must trust his heart John thank you so much thank you to all of you for joining us for this past hour have a great weekend [Music] you

Channel: The Trinity Forum

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Id: 2--M6vQmIsc

Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020