The Face of Evil:

(I posted this over at STTA, but it is one of those that kinda fits both places, so I am posting it here as well.  Maybe somebody else will find it that way.) What does the face of evil look like? We see it all around us, but most often we see it in silhouette, if you will.  In fact, often as we sort through the aftermath of grotesque wickedness, like the law-enforcement investigators in Boston, we see the horrendous aftermath, but we don't see the face that perpetrated the crime.    The fact is, evil wears different masks:  They are found all across the spectrum from the distortion of extreme righteousness, so called, as was the case with evil on that first Good Friday, all the way to the just out-and-out, unadulterated badness, that too often stalks our streets.     The Bible is clear that evil is here.  The Devil is not merely a personification; he is a real, spiritual person, Satan, Lucifer, the Dragon, and he gets around, and gets a lot done.  In the book of Job, he describes the territory he has marked with his foul scent:  "I've been 'roaming about on the earth and walking around on it.'"   (Job 1:7)  In the New Testament he is described as the "Prince of the Power of the Air."  (Ephesians 2:2)--no more localized than the air we breath.  He is not the evil opposite of God.  He lacks, for instance, the omni attributes: omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. He does get around, though, he is cunning and powerful, and he does have help.  His network is so widespread and effective that John says "The whole world lies in the power of the wicked one."  (1 John 5:19)    Not only are these spiritual entities busily spreading evil, you and I, the Bible makes clear, have evil in our core, and in the same way that the physical ecosystems of our world are degraded, the moral spiritual realm is polluted.  (Read Romans 8, and Ephesians 2:1-10 for both description and hope.  An evil tempter, tempting people with a propensity to sin, in a world that is skewed in an evil direction--there is a recipe for a mess.   Carnage, like that in Boston, gets our attention and causes us to cry out for answers:   "Who?" "Why?" "Where is God?" As to the last question, I assert that God is both here, with you, and in Boston.  The Bible teaches that He doesn't take coffee-breaks.  Look here, here, and especially here to see some things I have written after past tragedies. The face of evil is sometimes sanctimonious, at other times on fire with raw hatred.  It often is heavily colored with selfishness.  If you look around the eyes you can detect deception.  Ironically, and in a way that troubles me the mouth on the face of evil is often seen to be grinning.   I guess what troubles me most about thinking of the face of evil is I sometimes see it looking back at me from the mirror.   It's STTA.

Evil, A Demonstration of God's Love:

Last Sunday I presented the first message in a three part series on John 3:16.  I found my thoughts stimulated by J. Sidlow Baxter.  In the opening pages of his book he raises some objections to the concept of God’s love.  One of the problems he and others raise has to do with the horrendous evil in this world. 

The following few paragraphs, taken from my sermon notes, are some of my thoughts on the matter.

How can you talk about a God who loves when you look around at the mess this world is in?  Read the newspaper, or if you are more up to date, surf the web.  Either way you will find this world is a mess.
Disasters manmade and natural abound. 
In a 15 minute span the other day I personally—not via any public media--heard of two, one an utter display of depravity, the other a severe blow to a family.  I have no doubt that some research would have revealed thousands of instances of injustice, tragedy, and mayhem that took place in that quarter of an hour.  

God’s plan is not thwarted by this evil around us.  The fact of the matter is that God’s glory—and that is the grand purpose of creation—will ultimately be enhanced by God’s redeeming a group of people for His very own, from out of this suffering, perishing world, to live with Him in harmony  for all eternity.  (See  Romans 8:16-39)

The concept of God having people who would love Him and the possibility of evil in the world are not incompatible at all, in fact they are more related than you might think. 

Love, by its nature, involves a choice.  As any person who has tried and failed at love knows, you can’t make someone love you.   God did not create a race of automatons who are programed to act like they love Him--a world full of Stepford Christians.
Rather He created humans, who have the capacity to love.  The same abilities that enable us to love, also make possible sin and rebellion, and all the ugly results that brings. 

It will likely make your head hurt for a while as you try to wrap your mind around it, but there is evil in this world because God is a loving God.  God is so committed to the concept of love that He made the world so that people—the pinnacle of God’s creation in this world—could choose to love Him.  In making them with that ability to choose, it was necessary that we also have the ability to choose not to love, to not relate to God as we should.

In the end having the new heaven and the new earth populated with people who genuinely love Him will bring the greatest  glory to God and greatest good to all creation.

Tsunamis, unimaginable pain, and boundaries in my mind:

I posted this on my STTA site, but since it is a longer than usual STTA & since it will stay on top longer here, I decided to post it here, as well.

The earthquake and tsunami that have devastated Japan, and beyond, are off any scale that exists in my thinking. Massive waves that move across the ocean at 500 miles per hour, and tremors that cause buildings to sway like reeds in the wind don't exist in my mind. When "experts" explain these phenomena I gain a new appreciation for their magnitude, but I understand them only in the sense that I learn to parrot back some of what these specialists say. It is not dissimilar to my "understanding" of this computer. I know that when I press the "I" key that the letter appears on the screen in front of me, and that the code that produces that "I" can be stored on a hard drive or sent by digital signals across vast distances. (I'm going to date myself here.) I remember when manual typewriters were popular. I could examine the levers, springs, and gears and understand how it worked. I am confident that if I had put forth the effort I could have explained, complete with pictures, how my old Remington worked. This computer: in broad terms I can explain it, but much of it is a mystery. That is where I am in explaining the cataclysmic events of the past few days--my knowledge base is inadequate.
I think I know enough, however, to be confident that the correct answer to why this tragedy erupted in Japan, is "I don't know." Beware of those who have neat, tidy answers. The vast debris fields that once were neighborhoods in the Island nation, are matched by the clutter in our minds. I'm not sure we can altogether understand what has happened. What we can do, however, is "contain" the disruption in our mind and heart with some reality barriers.
"I don't understand, but I do know this."
What are some of the "this"es we can know?

• Disasters like the one that struck our neighbors on the other side of the globe, are tragic, in particular, because they are an accumulation of personal, totally real disasters. This morning the estimates are that 10,000 people died in the earthquake/tsunami. Each of them is a mom, dad, brother, sister, grandparent, or friend. Every one of those buildings was someones home, their place of employment, house of worship, school, etc. One of the dangers of the worldwide communication/news environment is we tend to see the devastation as if it were the tide washing away children's sand-castles. People talk of good that can come from this tragedy. We can identify good that has come from past tragedies, and I already hear of God's people reaching out with the Love-of-Christ. That is definitely good. One of the boundaries we must respect is to call things like this bad--in this case bad beyond my scale of reckoning. In the Old-Testament the word "evil" is used not only to describe the morally corrupt, but natural disasters. This kind of evil will be eliminated in the heavenly realm, Revelation 21:4. The natural disasters that afflicted Job were seen by him and his loved ones as evil, Job 42:11. Let us never be guilty of calling bad things good. Romans 8:28 does not say, "all things are good," but, "all things work together for good." Look in the context and you'll see that a short time before the Apostle pronounced the truth of verse 28, he wrestled with the presence of bad things in the world.
  
• God is in control. Sometimes we feel like God needs our help. We think that we need to lobby on His behalf and make sure others know this isn't His fault. It is true that God is not the author of evil, but He is in control in this world. His sovereignty extends from the falling sparrow to the culmination of all things. God was not napping when the earth moved with violence. Other than what He has revealed, I don't know why, but I do know the world is in His hand.
  
• People are responsible. The choices we make have consequences. When aggregates of people make choices--national policies, the direction of cultures, etc. those decisions have far reaching consequences. Where we build cities, how we provide them power, and how the people there live can have consequences far beyond what we see. The Old-Testament is full of examples of societies that became ripe for the judgment of God. The later part of Romans 1 records a pattern that is all too common. Fatalism is never the answer. We need to make wise, right decisions, and encourage the groups we are a part of to do so as well.
  
• We are to reach out with love and compassion whenever we are able. One of the reasons Christianity came to dominate the Roman world was because Christians reached out with compassion to those afflicted by plagues and other disasters. We must avoid being opportunists. At the same time we must, with courage and hope, reach out with the love God in the face of this world's darkness.
  

There is much that I don 't know. I am able to cope because of what God has graciously made sure for me.

It's STTA.
Some further thought:
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html

Hauling Water to a Thirsty, Unbelieving, Unconvinced World:

The view through my keyhole is narrow--bound as it is by my perception--but, magnified by the Internet, it is long.
Some friends of mine serve as Christ's witnesses in Phnom Penh. The tragic bridge collapse, of a few days ago, took place in their neighborhood. T. recently wrote:

We're writing with sad hearts. As you've probably seen or heard on the news, the
Water Festival ended with tragedy here in Phnom Penh last night. The latest
reports are claiming about 400 people died and 400 more were hospitalized after
a stampede on a bridge not too far from our apartment.
. . . To be honest, we are feeling sad and frustrated. . . . 400 people almost all of whom did not know Jesus suffocated or were crushed to death, 400 families lost
children, parents, siblings and just as many are in hospitals fighting for their
lives.
Because there was no way to really help besides praying for the families, I spent the day driving my motorbike with as many cases of water as I could carry to deliver to families waiting outside three of the major hospitals which received stampede victims. . . .
At the last hospital, the people in charge directed me to take the water to the place where families came to claim bodies. There were so many exhausted, hopeless faces. I felt incredibly inadequate showing up on a motorbike loaded down with a measly 10 cases of water in the face of such loss; but the workers there were kind and thanked me. . . .

The scripture comes to mind, "And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward." (Matthew 10:42, NASB95)
My friend sees his act as insignificant, and by the metric of the horrendous scale of the disaster, I have to agree, but apparently there is a Divine measurement that imputes far greater significance to a moped loaded with water delivered by a kind, though foreign face.
A few days after receiving the note above, I happened to see T. online. We chatted for a moment. He observed that most of the people affected by the tragedy believe in reincarnation. They are comforted that because these loved ones died in such a terrible manner while participating in a religious event, they would come back in a better state in the next life. He asked,
"How do we argue with that?"
I don't think my friend's question was primarily intellectual. He is well versed in apologetics, and knows how to share the Gospel. His query came from the gut more than from the head. How can we take away this shred of hope--false, though it may be--when lack of language, trust, and cultural awareness make it nearly impossible for me to share the real hope. Like his meager offering of water in the face of such overwhelming need, T. felt that what he had to offer was inadequate.
My reply to T.'s question, "How do we argue with that?" was brief.
"We don't."
I went on to offer some further explanation about how we trust God to penetrate hearts with the Good News. He and I know, however, that such penetration is usually frustratingly slow and sporadic. I wished for a jet plane, a couple of cups of coffee and time to listen and talk.

I share some further thoughts here not only, not even primarily, for my friends there on the front-line--I figure they already know more than me--but mostly for all of us who constantly struggle with questions related to tragic events.

• First, T., though your offering of water is literally a drop in an ocean, you were precisely and profoundly right to offer it.
  I don't have his book in front of me but Theologian and pastor, Millard Ericson, in his book, Christian Theology, makes the important distinction between a pastoral and a Theological answer to the problem of evil. People who are hurting are much more in need of a drink of water, offered from a kind hand, than they are a tightly reasoned Theodicy offered from a brilliant mind.
• While my answer was brief--partly due to the constraints of i-chatting & slow-typing--I still think it is right. Clearly there is at least (I say "at least knowing that many, to one degree or another, hold to and practice evidential-apologetics.) an element of truth in presuppositionalism. Our task is not so much to prove the validity of the Gospel as to proclaim it. We believe that "Life and reality make sense only on the basis of Christian presuppositions." (http://home.comcast.net/~webpages54/ap/presup.html) As Jesus said, "If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority. (John 7:17, ESV) There is always an element of risk in faith, at least on the front end. No apologetic safety line can make the plunge into faith--especially when the starting point is a culture largely devoid of Christian influence--totally free of fear. Examples abound of those who received the Good News when it appeared to many outsiders that it was totally unreasonable for them to do so. Later they found it made perfect sense. Often those Saul/Paul-like conversions lead to significant penetration of the truth of God into a people-group. Keep hauling water, both in plastic bottles and the "Living" kind.
• We cannot get away from the reality that our security in the Lord is not primarily based on our complete understanding of His ways, but in our trust of Him. We need to refer to Deuteronomy 29:29 often.
• We are far better to offer no answer than to traffic in easy, pat, feel-good pseudo-truths. Following another disaster, Al Mohler shared some words worth reading in this regard, "God and the Tsunami."

To my friends in Cambodia, thanks. To the rest of us, Let's haul some water.