Well, good morning everyone and welcome to our virtual service.
Over this last couple of weeks, I have felt like an actor in a dystopian film - and I haven’t quite learned my lines yet.
They
say a week is a long time in politics. Well, two weeks feels like perpetuity in
a pandemic! I have to say, I find all this very challenging and I’m struggling
a bit to adjust.
I’m
not used to speaking into smartphones. I don’t relate well to small electronic
devices. I crave old fashioned human interaction.
A
fortnight ago, I preached in church with real people. We were a little down in
attendance but not much. Now, we are all confined to our personal bunkers, stuck
in our homes and wondering when all this will come to an end.
Unsociable
is the new sociable as we all avoid one another in order to help one another. It’s
weird isn’t it?
Can
I say, “thank you” to all of you who are working really hard to help us pray
and worship even though we cannot meet physically. Involvement in Morning
Prayer is actually up since all this started thanks to Zoom videoconferencing.
Thanks
as well to everyone who is keeping in contact with others by phone, email, and text,
on Messenger, Facebook and Instagram.
We
have tried to link people up to ensure that the most at risk among us get the help
they need. If you need a bit of support, let us know and we’ll do what we can.
When
we were preaching through First John back in January/February, I said that I
felt that 2020 is going to be a year when we really learn in a deeper way than
before to love one another as brothers and sisters. This is our moment!
Can
I encourage you, if you haven’t yet done so, to get in contact with someone
else in church just for a bit of a chat, and share something uplifting to lift
the morale?
We
have worked hard to ensure that our church family is cared for, but I hope you’ll
be inspired to look out for neighbours living near you as well.
Some
of you have already ‘adopted’ your street and offered to help out wherever you
can – that is so good. The world will know we are Christians by our love and when
this is all behind us, it won’t be forgotten. Let your light shine…
Introduction
Two
weeks ago, I spoke on the Book of Job. It’s a poetic book in the middle of the Bible
that explores (but never really answers) the biggest question of them all; why
do bad things happen to good people?
Professor Sir Norman Anderson was an outstanding academic
with a brilliant legal mind; he lectured on Law at Cambridge University. He was
elected to the British Academy of leading scholars honoured for their
distinction in the humanities and social sciences.
He was also a Christian and he wrote a book called
“The Evidence for the Resurrection” which argues from a forensic perspective how
compelling the case is for Jesus’ rising from the dead as the four Gospels claim.
Norman Anderson was a man of great intellectual
stature and strong faith. But that faith was severely shaken when his only son,
Hugh, an exceptionally gifted young man, undergraduate at Cambridge, suddenly fell
ill and died of a brain tumour.
A few days later, Anderson gave a talk, as planned,
on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.
He explained why he believed that God raised Jesus
from the dead and then he said, “On this I am prepared to stake my life. In this
faith my son died just a few days ago, shortly after saying, “I'm drawing near to
my Lord.” Anderson said, “I am convinced that my son was not mistaken.”
Yes,
but why? What a waste! A gifted Christian in the prime of his life, with such a
future ahead of him, a great gift for the church and the world – taken,
apparently randomly.
We
have to admit and accept that a lot of suffering is simply a mystery to us. Deuteronomy
29.29 says that the secret things belong to the Lord alone.
I
once heard the testimony of a man called Tulip Scott. That’s an unusual name
isn’t it? Tulip obviously never caught on as a boy’s name, and I think for good
reason…
Anyway,
this man used to go around asking people, “Do you see anything funny about my
face?” How do you reply to a question like that? I mean, it’s a bit awkward isn’t
it?
Well,
people would look at his face and there was nothing particularly noteworthy about
it. So, they’d say, “Well, no I can’t see anything particularly out of the
ordinary…”
And
he’d smile and say, “The earliest memory I have is of my mother tying my hands to
my legs with rope. I would struggle and fight it as she did this. I never
understood what she was doing. Why would my own mother inflict this on me, a
small boy?”
And
then he’d say, “But I learned much later that she did it because she loved me. I
had smallpox and she was preventing me from scratching my face and disfiguring it
for life.”
Maybe
some of suffering is like that… Perhaps there is a bigger picture that we
cannot see or fathom, which we will understand only too well one day… but which
we may not ever understand in this life. It may take until the next life to see
why some suffering occurs.
A
fortnight ago, I asked, “does the Bible, God’s word, offer any clues as to why a
loving God would allow suffering in the world he made and declared good? And I said,
“yes it does.”
To
remind you, firstly, some suffering is allowed by God for a greater good. Sometimes
it’s an alarm bell that shakes us out of spiritual apathy. C.S. Lewis once said,
“God whispers to us in our pleasures but he shouts to us in our pain. Suffering
is God's megaphone to awake a sleeping world.”
Suffering
can also be a friend in disguise that brings us into a sweeter, closer
relationship with God.
Secondly,
some suffering, we saw two weeks ago, is the result of personal
sin.
For
example, if I view pornographic material, I will suffer damage and dysfunction in
my relationships with women. So much misery in marriage and breakdown in family
life and confusion and chaos is caused by this scourge in our society.
Thirdly,
some suffering is caused by collective sin. The world God made has gone
wrong because of the sin of Adam and Eve that we all share in; our inclination to
want to define what is right and wrong.
People
celebrate what God calls ‘sin’. People profane what God calls ‘holy’ and it all
brings blight and decay on the entire created order.
This
Coronavirus, like all pestilence, and all sickness, is one of the consequences
of living in a fallen world. This is what I mean by collective sin; nothing
works quite like God intended it to.
But
you could add up all the sin of every human being on earth and it still wouldn’t
account for everything that is wrong in the world.
The
Bible speaks of a fourth source of suffering; the demonic. Yes, this is God’s
world because he created it. But it’s also Satan’s world, because he corrupted
it.
You
might recall, in Luke 13, there’s the story about a woman whose body was bent
over and contorted so that she could not straighten up at all. The Bible tells
us that Jesus saw her.
·
And
he called her forward.
·
She
approached him.
·
And
he put his hands on her and said, “Woman, you are set free from your
infirmity.”
·
Immediately,
she was released.
·
She
straightened up; her twisted body shape became upright and she praised God.
Luke
specifically says that she had been crippled by an evil spirit. Jesus described
the woman as “a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan [had] kept bound for eighteen
long years.”
We
have a spiritual enemy, Satan, who hates us, who hates God, and who is able to harm
us, though this book of Job tells us that he is allowed to inflict suffering
only up to a limit stipulated by God.
Last
week, we skipped over the satanic verses in Job 1 and 2, because I wanted us to
try and understand what Job’s suffering felt like for him.
Remember,
he didn’t know anything about the strange conversation in chapters 1 and
2 between God and Satan. He never did get to know about it, even at the end of
the book.
But
today, we’re going to take a peek behind the scenes. This part of the story
tells us that, just as there is invisible air, pollen, bacteria, viruses and radio
waves all around us, there are there are also dark spiritual realities in our
world that are hidden from our view.
The
hidden reality for Job is that God and Satan have a wager on whether adversity
would cause Job, a devout and righteous man, to curse God and abandon his
faith.
As
I said last time, all good dramas work with suspense and this is no exception.
We know why Job is suffering. We can see that his friends are out of order to
blame Job’s suffering on him, but they can’t.
Satan
goes on the rampage; Job loses his income, his savings, his pension, his house
and his children. Then he loses his health. Then his wife turns on him. Then
his friends spend 34 chapters judging him and blaming him. It’s horrible.
But
the explanation that God does sometimes allow suffering as a result of Satan’s
work leaves us with more questions than it answers.
Why?
We may never know – but God does know.
Job
never got the answer to any his questions. He never found out why God let him
suffer like he did. But he did find peace before his suffering ended.
What
happened? He came to a place where, even if he didn’t know why, he accepted and
believed that God did know – and he resolved to say yes to God and trust
him.
Towards
the end of last year, David Emerton and Andrew Killick brought to my attention
a radio interview that was broadcast on Christmas Eve. You can still access it on
BBC Sounds if you type “A Bright Yellow Light” into the search bar. It is worth
a listen.
It's
an interview with a gifted and successful self-made man called Nadim Ednan-Laperouse.
He describes how he used to be someone with no interest in faith at all. He
never thought about God. You probably haven’t heard of him.
But
if I told you that his teenage daughter Natasha died on a plane about 3 years
ago as a result of an allergic reaction after eating a sandwich that wasn’t
clearly labelled, that might ring a bell. It made all the news headlines.
Nadim
spoke very movingly about the heart-breaking experience of trying to keep his
daughter alive, of holding her in his arms, of giving her two antihistamine injections,
of paramedics administering CPR for 45 minutes, of nothing working.
But
then the interviewer asks him about a spiritual experience he had while he was trying
to save her life. And he describes in fascinating detail, to his astonishment, seeing
five angels, as in extremely high definition, looking at him and moving calmly around
her.
I
say ‘in great detail’ but there were some aspects of these heavenly figures which
he could not quite put into words. He is a creative designer, but he had never before
imagined anything like what he saw then. The light around them he says was very
bright, very vivid, but incredibly soothing and not hard on the eye.
He
whooshed the angels away with his arm, thinking they had come for her soul, and
he shouted “It’s not her time!” With that, they vanished and she died. Nothing
more could be done for her.
What
you probably don’t know is that, over the year previously, Natasha had had been
going to a church, seeking God. She had given her life to Christ and was
preparing to be baptized.
Following
Natasha’s death, the family started going to her church, and at least two of
them including Nadim have now come to faith.
During
the inquest and legal challenge to get the law changed on food labeling, Nadim
prayed that the truth would come to light and all the vested interests of
business would be exposed. Every prayer was answered. The inquest led to a change
in the law in a record short space of time.
When
the then Prime Minister mentioned Natasha at her party conference, Nadim stopped
to pray to give thanks and, as he did, the whole room was lit up by that same
indescribable yellow light he saw on the plane. And he felt the strong,
powerful presence of God with him right there.
I
tell that story (and I do encourage you to listen to the whole thing) because I
think it illustrates that there is a spiritual realm that is real, that is
mostly unseen, and that there is so much going on all the time that we
don’t know about.
Suffering
is often decisive in determining the genuineness of our relationship with God. I
have known people who I thought had a real heart for God become hardened away
from faith because of affliction. I have also seen hard and angry hearts soften
for the same reason.
I
know a man in France called Jacques who had three daughters. Each of them died
of leukaemia before reaching adulthood. He told me once that, years on, he
still feels bereft; he and his wife will never fully recover from the bitterness
of that experience – until they get to heaven where all pain and tears wash
away.
But
he thanks God, with a tear in his eye, that in his mercy that tragedy started his
journey from militant Marxist agitator, always protesting about something, to one
of the most soft-hearted, grace-filled, joyful Christians I have ever met. He is
now a powerful evangelist who has led many to Christ.
None
of what I have shared fully answers the question “why?” But I hope at least
that it helps you to think about all this differently.
Conclusion
As
I come to a close, I want to say that Christians must view suffering in the
light of two facts, that are rarely thought about by others.
Firstly,
suffering and pleasure in this world are both magnified in next.
Psalm
73 complains “What’s the point of living for God when it often comes with pain,
when wicked, arrogant people live comfortably, make life hell for everyone else
and then pass away peacefully?”
But
it ends with the thought, “Would you trade places with them on judgement day?”
Jesus
saw weeping and gnashing of teeth in the next world. He also said to the repentant
thief on the cross next to him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”
Paul
spoke in Romans 8 of “this momentary and light affliction which is as nothing
compared to glory to be revealed…”
Secondly,
when we ask as Christians, “Why? Why do bad things happen to good people?” we ask
it from the shadow of the cross.
In
this talk, I’ve shared three true stories of parents watching their children die;
Norman Anderson, Nadim Ednan-Laperouse and Jacques Barbero. I think this is
probably the most unbearable pain humans ever experience.
Why
did God allow his Son, who lived a perfect life, to suffer the worst
death anyone has faced? Why?
When
you next ask the question “why?”, remind yourself that Jesus asked it too at
the point of his greatest anguish and distress. “My God, my God, why
have you abandoned me?”
As
he took upon himself the wrath of God for the sin of the whole world, the shock
was so traumatic, the agony was so excruciating, the mental torment was so
harrowing that I think he lost all perspective.
I
think that for that dreadful moment as he suddenly felt thirsty because he was
passing through hell, he didn’t know why his Father’s affection had abruptly been
withdrawn from him… to be replaced by the condemnation and separation from God
our sins deserve.
He
who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
Let’s
pray…
Sermon preached via video link at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 29 March 2020
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