The Apocalypse: God and Evil — Q&A

What if God’s ultimate purpose isn’t centered on your happiness—but on his own glory? In this episode, we explore how that unsettling truth is actually the key to understanding suffering, finding real joy, and seeing your life in a much bigger, better story.

Transcript

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Welcome to this episode of From the Cutting Room Floor. This is a podcast where I'm able to spend a little extra time on matters that were mentioned or maybe not mentioned on uh in the sermon on Sunday. And uh yesterday's sermon was heavy. Topic is God and evil, and thinking through God's relationship to it, our relationship to it, um, what God's purpose was in it. Did he have one? All those sorts of things. That message sought to uh dive into that very, very heavy, very weighty subject. And there's there's a there's a topic that that it was kind of hinted at. Um I didn't spend as much time, perhaps, as uh I would have liked, uh, but it could come at us in the form of the question, what do you think God's ultimate purpose is? Um what is God for? Maybe is another way to ask that question. Uh most Christians, I think, if if they're being honest, would say something like, God's purpose is to love us, his purpose is to save us, it's to give us a good life. And no, none of that's wrong. But but here's the thing if if God's ultimate end, ultimate end is our redemption, our happiness, our flourishing, then the entire cosmos is man-centered. And the Bible just won't let us go there. Uh, Psalm 115 says, Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory. Not to us, not by a long shot. Now, I want to be careful here because this can sound cold if you're not tracking. God does love you deeply, but you are not the center of his purposes. He is. And I would contend that that actually is the best news possible, even though, even though it may not feel that way at first. Let me explain what I mean. There's a theologian named John Frame who makes this observation about the problem of evil. Um, the question of why God allows suffering. He says that so many attempts to answer that question start from the wrong assumption. They assume that God's ultimate purpose is human happiness. And if that's your starting point, evil becomes almost impossible to explain. Because clearly God isn't maximizing our comfort. But frame would say, flip the assumption, flip it. God's ultimate purpose is to glorify himself. And when you start there, everything changes. Now, I know that's where that's where some of us would tense up. Does that make God some kind of cosmic egomaniac? Uh, you know, it's like he created everything just so he could admire himself. I get why that sounds that way, but but here's what we're doing when we think that. We are projecting our own condition onto God. When we are self-centered, it's ugly, rude, prideful. Um, and that's because we are genuinely unworthy, unworthy of that kind of self-attention. We're not that important. We don't have that kind of weight. But think about the sun for a second. The sun sits at the center of our solar system, and we don't accuse the sun of arrogance for being there. It belongs there. It has the gravitational mass to hold everything else in orbit. If you tried to move it and put something else at the center, a moon, an asteroid, anything, the whole system would fly apart. God is like that. His worth, his glory, his being is so infinitely weighty that nothing else could occupy the center without everything coming undone. He's not self-centered out of vanity, he's self-centered out of necessity, out of truth. There is no other candidate for the position. And here's the flip side of that. If God were to take greater pleasure in anything other than himself, uh, in us, say, then that thing would have more worth than he does, which would make him less than what he created, which is not God at all. As one theologian put it, for human beings, self-worship is the worst sin. For God, it is the epitome of his righteousness. Now, so what does this have to do with evil, with suffering? Well, um, it has everything to do with it. Think about Job. Job suffered genuinely, horrifically, and he demanded answers. He wanted to take God to court and make his case. And in a way, what Job was doing was placing himself at the center of the story. This is my pain, this is my justice, this is my vindication. And God shows up, and what does he say? He doesn't address Job's pain directly, not once. Instead, for four chapters, God recounts his own glory in creation, the foundations of the earth, the storehouses of snow, the constellations wheeling overhead. It it reads almost like God is ignoring the question, but he's not ignoring it. He's reframing it. Job needed to see that there was something so much larger than himself, something so vast and magnificent that his pain, real as it was, needed to be situated inside that larger story. And here's what's remarkable: it works. By the time God is done speaking, Job is undone. He's he's not in despair, but he's in worship. He says, My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. And somehow that's enough. The suffering hasn't been explained, but Job has seen God and the scale of his pain has shifted. And so I think there's something almost mathematical happening that applies to us. When our pain fills our entire field of vision, when it's all we can see, it feels it feels absolute, it feels crushing, but when something larger enters our vision, the pain doesn't disappear, but its scale changes relative to everything else. And nothing is larger than God. The Psalms, I think, are full of this sort of dynamic. Psalm 18 opens, I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer. Now, David isn't writing that from a comfortable chair. He's writing it basically from a foxhole. He's writing it precisely because evil has threatened to overtake him. And the move he makes, the move that sustains him, is to take his eyes off the threat and fix them on the enormousness of God. That's not denial. That's that's not that's not toxic positivity. That is the most theologically honest thing a human being can do. Because it is true. God really is greater than the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Um there's this famous line out there that John Piper, who really uh is a derivative of the works of Jonathan Edwards, even the Westminster Confession of Faith, um, says, God's passion for his own glory and his passion for my joy in him are not at odds. God's passion for his own glory and his passion for my joy in him, are not at odds. Those two things, God being glorified and you experiencing deep joy, are not in competition. They're the same thing. When God is most magnified in your life, you are most satisfied. When you are most satisfied in him, he is most glorified. Bruce Ware puts it this way: he says, God's glory is our good. When we stop chasing the emptiness of self-satisfaction and turn toward the fullness of God, when we acknowledge our poverty and his endless riches, we trade in one for the other. So you see, the cosmos is not man-centered, but a God-centered cosmos. Um, and a God-centered cosmos is the most human, flourishing cosmos that could possibly exist because we were made for him. And when we find him, when we really find him and get lost in him, we find the one thing that satisfies completely. So let me let me finish with this. If you're in a season of suffering now, and and some of you are, I'm not going to tell you that God is going to explain it all. He didn't explain it to Job, but I will tell you this: the answer to your suffering is not an answer, it's a person. And that person is so immeasurably great, so weightily glorious, so inexhaustibly good, that when you find your refuge in him, the magnitude of your pain begins to shrink. Not because the pain isn't real, but because he is more real. And so we can say hope isn't the absence of adversity. Hope is a redeemer who promises to overtake it. And I can tell you that redeemer is worth centering your entire life around. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next time.