If God is loving, why is the world so dang messed up? Or another way to put this: if God is so loving, why does the dorm food taste so bad? If God is so loving, why do I have to take organic chem? Why do they have to have midterms if God is so loving? I ate in your cafeteria tonight, and one of my questions is if God is so loving, why do I have gas?

Perhaps all of us have wrestled a little more seriously than that with this subject of evil, suffering, and pain. It’s something that humans have thought about for years and years and years. Just open the newspaper. I know that where I live in the last year we’ve seen horrid things. One of the citizens from my community has just been sent to prison for several terms for the successive kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of several women and their husbands over a number of years. Recently in Atlanta, a stock trader murdered several of his colleagues. Earlier this year a gentleman was walking along the road, and was kidnapped and dragged to his death by some white supremacists. Evil abounds. Earlier this year in Colorado several young teenagers were killed by their classmates. All of us have experienced pain and suffering, are currently experiencing pain and suffering, or will experience pain and suffering. It’s part of the human condition.

This hit home for me recently when one of my childhood idols, one of my heroes, was taken at a young age. As a young kid I was picked on a lot. I was small, thin—thinner than I am now, if you can believe that; in fact, long before Dennis Rodman I was called "Worm"—and people taunted me, big kids would think they could show how much testosterone they had by beating me up, you know, they’re like twice my size. As a child I used to hang out at this one park with all the other kids, and a lot of older kids. For some reason, there was this kid there named Carl who reached out to me, let me hold his watch during football games, waved at me when he was circling the bases after a homerun. Whenever there was trouble and he was around, he would just kind of come up and say, "Larry’s with me," and everybody would melt away, because he was everybody’s hero. For some reason, he watched out for me, he cared for me. Well I followed his career after that, he was four years older than me. I read the papers as he made all-city, all-league in three or four sports. He went on and got a college scholarship to San Jose State and was all-league there. Then he was drafted by the Rams, and for ten seasons played middle linebacker and finally was all-pro. Well, I lost track of him, and I was really saddened because I always had dreamed of the time when I would meet him after a game or in the locker room and go up and thank him for what he’d done for me as a child. I’m sure he’d long since forgotten, but it was important for me to thank him, and show how grateful I was for what he’d done for me. And that dream ended one morning when I looked in the sports section and saw that Carl had been killed driving out to a youth camp somewhere in the desert of California. And I just started weeping. It devastated me. Why had God allowed Carl to die? Carl had seemingly done nothing wrong and done everything right! And Carl left behind a young wife and two children. And here he was on his way to a youth camp! He wasn’t going out to kidnap someone or drag someone to their death, he was doing something good. Why, God, why? Why did this happen to Carl? Why didn’t you prevent this? Why do I have to suffer now? It devastated me. I don’t know why God took Carl, why God allowed Carl to die that night alone and bleeding to death on the desert floor. I don’t know.

And I guarantee you tonight, I probably won’t be able to answer to your satisfaction why God allows suffering and pain. Theologians and philosophers have debated this for years, and they’ve not been able to satisfy most of the masses of this world with a satisfactory answer to that question. What I do hope to do tonight though, is to offer some possible explanations that might help.

The first thing I’d like us to think about is, ask yourself, do I really want God to destroy all evil? That’s a tempting premise if you think about it. If God just got rid of all evil, we wouldn’t have murder and rape and racism and sexual exploitation, incest, mosquitoes, acne, whatever. We wouldn’t have these things anymore. We wouldn’t have to listen to country and western music! All evil would be gone, right? But then I think, do I really want that, because if God was to destroy all evil, what would happen to me? Sure I’m capable like you of doing some heroic, good deeds—that’s part of the human condition. But I know I have some junk in me that is also not very nice. On a given day I’m tempted to flip off someone that cuts me off when I’m driving. I’m tempted to laugh at a racist joke. I’m known to hurt even the people I most love, my wife and children. My best friend had his son over one day, I was babysitting, I got mad at him and I tripped him as he ran by me. Why did I do that? I am capable of garbage! If God was to wipe out all evil, I would go right with it. And you might ask yourself what might happen to you, if God was to wipe out all evil. If God was to destroy all evil at midnight, how many of us would be there for breakfast in the morning? I’m not sure I’d really want God to just get rid of all evil.

But couldn’t God have made us without the possibility of screwing up? That’s another option. Why couldn’t God just make us so we would do good, charitable, kind things? Why couldn’t God have done that? He made us, he could’ve done that, why not? Again, this is tempting, because then we wouldn’t have a lot of these problems. But again, we’d lose something if that was really the way it was, because we would be less than human beings at that point. We would be merely robots who were controlled by God if he made us to live a certain way, if we never did anything wrong. God, rather, gave us dignity by giving us the option of saying, ‘God, I love you, I thank you, and I want to know you.’ Or we could say, ‘God, thanks but no thanks,’ and go out and do our own thing. And I know when I go out and do my own thing and turn my back on God, I start doing things not God’s way but my way, and I add power to evil every time I turn my back on God. But that’s part of the human condition, and we have to ask ourselves, would we rather be puppets or humans? I’m thankful that someone didn’t program my wife’s mind to say to me, ‘I love you, I want you, I need you, marry me!’ But she in a sense eliminated all other prospects and chose me, and then I could respond in love to her. That is real love, that is real relationship. If I had somehow been able to program her mind to say ‘I love you,’ what is that? I think if we’re honest, we would rather have the option, when it comes to love, of choosing or not choosing. And God wants that same situation with us, that we freely choose him. The down side of that paradigm is we really ignore him, and that’s when evil begins to rise.

Now, before you get to hard on God, I would argue most of us are going to do that very same thing when you procreate. At some point, you and your spouse are going to decide your going to have kids. Now, just possibly your kids are going to grow up to be wonderful and adore you and your going to have great moments. I just love it when my kids call me ‘daddy’. I mean, there’s nothing better than that! My son says, ‘Daddy, I’m ready to be tucked in now.’ That’s just wonderful. But there’s also the day when my son says, ‘Daddy, I don’t want you to hold my hand and walk me to school anymore.’ Or my daughter comes home and says, ‘I don’t like the Grateful Dead, I like the Spice Girls!’ Wow, that’s evil! But that possibility exists, that your kids could go anywhere, they could do evil things. They could turn their back on all your best intentions. They could hate you. They could blame you for the good things you’ve done. We’ve all seen it happen. You may have had a brother or sister who’s done that. Yet you will probably decide, as I did, that it’s worth the risk, go ahead, and have children. You know it might turn out bad, but you’re hoping that freely they will choose to love you. That might help us understand why God created us with the ability to choose as part of our human dignity.

I also might add that all of evil is clearly not God’s fault, there are some things that are just simply our fault as humans. People continue to build their houses on known fault lines or where volcanoes are active. That’s not God’s fault, that’s humans’ fault. I have friends that have gotten into cars with drunk drivers and have been hurt, some have been killed. That’s not God’s fault, those are human decisions, poor human decisions. Right now, God has provided enough food in this world to feed everybody, yet I know in our country, where we have 5% of the world’s population and consume 40% of the world’s resources, that there’s not enough food to go around because of human selfishness. As Gandhi said, ‘There’s enough food for man’s need, but not enough for man’s greed.’ God has provided enough food. The fact that people are starving is not God’s fault. Humans are in error there. But still we could ask, couldn’t God stop some of these things? Couldn’t he have stopped Carl from getting into the car that night, or couldn’t he stop the person from kidnapping that child, couldn’t he stop that guy from pulling over and grabbing that black man and tying him up? There’s things that you could legitimately ask, he doesn’t have to control everything, but why couldn’t God have just stopped a few things? Well, I know God does do that sometimes. The question is why does it seem so random, why sometimes does God do it and sometimes not. Again, I think we have to be careful when we start saying God has to step in in every single situation, because I think about myself, if I was to look forward into my day, and I’d see I’m going to say an unkind thing to my sister, so I don’t go near my sister, or at school today I’m going to cheat on my exam, so I don’t go to class today, or I’m going to laugh at a racist joke, don’t go over there. Essentially it ends up with me never getting out of bed! It’s important to remember that not all evil, not all pain is caused by God.

One thing the bible says is that God cares about us when we do suffer. The bible doesn’t lay out an air-tight answer for why there’s suffering, but it does suggest how we can live with suffering. One of the things the bible tells us is that God is a long-suffering God. God cares for us when we’re in pain and actually offers us comfort when we suffer. I know I think well, God, you’re way out there, I’m here, how can you possibly know what I’m going through, care about it or do anything about it? It helps me to remember this story, a story about a play that was written after World War II, where this author decided he would set up a scene where the Jews were putting God on trial for the Holocaust. And the Jews found God guilty in this play, and they decided God you’re going to be punished, and we’re going to punish you in three ways. First, you’re going to have to lose your son, since we lost all of ours; second, you’re not just going to die, but you’re going to be brutally tortured and maimed, because that’s the kind of stuff we had to go through; and thirdly, you’re going to have to be born a Jew to know what it’s like to be ostracized and spat upon and kicked around just for your race. Well, if you’ve read any part of the historical accounts of Jesus, you know that’s exactly what the bible shows, that God invaded history in the person of Jesus Christ and played by the same rules that we’ve all had to play by. He endured suffering and pain, and was ultimately killed by the worst form of execution at that time, crucifixion—the Romans invented it for their worst criminals, to deter crime.

Jesus was tortured that way for telling the truth. If anyone was innocent and didn’t deserve to suffer it was Jesus. So when I wonder, does God care, is God long-suffering, I know God cares about me because he had to endure the same kind of pain I’ve had to if not worse, because he played by the same rules we have to play by. All of us are going to suffer if we aren’t suffering already. The question is, do you want to suffer alone, or do you want to suffer in the arms of the one whose hands are scarred by the nails of crucifixion? I have a friend that one day heard the screeching sound of a car slamming on its brakes, and then the thud of a dog being hit, this beloved dog. His friends ran up and said, your dog just got run over! And this eight-year-old boy went running home, didn’t even go look at the dog, ran home, ran up the steps, burst through the door sobbing, his mother pulled him to her, and he said, ‘My dog is dead!’ His mother held him close as he wept, and then she began to cry, and he began to feel the hot tears of his mother on his cheeks. As his tears became her tears. His pain became her pain. When we are in pain, that becomes Jesus’ pain, and when we cry Jesus weeps. When we suffer Jesus suffers. He’s been there, he’s been through it. That helps me when I suffer, it helps me to live not knowing the ultimate answer to this question. Because of all the gods, Jesus is the only one with wounds.

I may not have the ultimate answer, but in Jesus I do have the ultimate solution. If you can imagine Carl, my friend, driving along, he fell asleep at the wheel, the car flipped over, he’s lying on the desert floor dying. What Carl needed at that moment was not an answer to why this happened. He didn’t need someone to come up and say well, you know, you didn’t take enough No-Doz, you took your eye off the road, and you flipped it over, and now your lying here and your arteries split open, he didn’t need all that. He needs a solution, he needs someone to come and doctor him up and make him better. If you can imagine someone sees this happen yet he doesn’t believe there’s any more to this life than that, all he can say is well, that’s it. But if I saw this happen, I can run up and say Carl, I don’t know why this is happening, I don’t know why you’re suffering right now. But I do know that this is not the end. This is just a small part of all that you could have in your life, and that Jesus says if you will allow him, he will come and bandage up your wounds. He will come and take that part of you that’s evil away, so that you can now enter into a kingdom where there is no suffering and no pain and no sorrow. I don’t have the ultimate answer to that problem, but you can have the ultimate solution, that this is not the end.

Someday God will get rid of all evil and all pain and all sorrow, he promises to do that. God’s being patient right now, because he wants people to respond to him. But at some point, God’s going to get rid of all evil, because God is just. He’s not going to let convicted rapists, known murderers, people who willfully hurt other people, into his kingdom, he’s going to destroy all evil. The question is, what’s going to happen to us when that happens? At some point this evil has to be dealt with, the evil that’s inside of me, the evil that’s inside of you if you’re a normal human being. Jesus comes along and says, ‘I can take care of that, I can get you out of this predicament. I will come and take that evil and I will die in your place. I will pay the penalty for your wrongdoing, if you’ll allow me to.’ The picture I have when God comes to punish evil, is sort of like my friend Carl, when God comes to my evil, Jesus says ‘I’ve taken care of that, I’ve paid for him, he’s with me.’

So although we can’t solve this problem of evil, I’m hoping that tonight there’s enough that’s been said that can allow you to live, having the ultimate question unanswered, that you know you can live with suffering, and that what you’re going through is not the end.