 And it's so important that we know why we believe what we believe, that we have a fully formed Biblical worldview that impacts the way that we live our lives. And just as we said in week number one, it's also important that we're able to answer the question for the hope that lies within us. Peter admonishes Christians to be ready to give an answer to anyone, especially those who are from the outside who when they look in on our lives as followers of Jesus, they see something different about us and the way that we live our lives and the way that we approach even the difficult subjects of life that we're covering in this series. There ought to be faith, hope and love that is demonstrated through the life of a believer that actually causes people to ask the question, why do you believe what you believe and why is there hope in your life in a world that is seemingly hopeless? Why is it that you're able to love your neighbor and even your enemies in a world where everyone is hell bent on vengeance and justice? How is it that you can have faith in a God that you cannot see but yet you live your life and even lay your life down because of that faith? And this is what it means for us to be able to give an answer to those who ask related to the hope that lies within us. And this second installment of this series, we're gonna be asking a big question. Why I believe the world is a mess? Why I believe the world is a mess? And you know the reality is that's not an unusual question. I think if you look across the landscape, people who are Christians, people who are not, there are a lot of people asking this question. Why is the world in such a mess today? Why is it that we have more education of more people than ever before and yet the world is still not solved? But 150 years ago when progressive thinkers and secularists were trying to ask the question or trying to answer the question, how do we fix our broken world? One of the big promises was we'll have a utopian society if we can just educate more people. But yet here we are about 150 years later and we have more people educated. We have higher levels of education, higher levels of literacy than we've ever had before and yet it seems that the world is in a bigger mess than it's ever been. Why is the world in such a mess if we have such innovation and technology and we have higher standards of living and cleaner food? Why is it that there are still wars? Why is it that we're living under the constant cloud of nuclear proliferation? Why is it that climate change is such an issue and fear and anxiety is gripping an entire generation with all of our technology and all of our ability to travel and even our ability to go to the farthest recesses of our galaxies with the advent of the internet and medicine and science. Why is the world still a mess? Why haven't we resolved these issues and bigger questions that are even connected to that? Why is there still evil that is advancing in the earth? Well, as Christians our answer is just simply one word. It's the issue of sin. You wanna know why the world is such a mess? The world would answer that and say, well, we're missing something that if we can find that one thing we'll be able to fix all the problems of the world. If we can just bring all nations together and have one world governance, then we'll fix all the problems. If we just take from the rich and we give it to the poor then we'll solve all the problems in the world. If we just had better science, if we just had better literacy, we'd fix all the problems in the world but we can't solve the problem of sin with all of those things because the problem of sin is not an external problem. The problem of sin is an internal problem in the human heart. And sin goes all the way back to the very beginning of the story of creation and the fall that we find in the biblical record. This is the story that we as Christians look at and say this is where the world went wrong. One of the major philosophical questions that people have been asking for millennia is this. And oftentimes it's asked even within a church and especially in the church. It's this, why does the world have so much pain and suffering and evil in it? And when we begin to ask that question and even from the perspective of we believe in God, that's what we covered in week number one. We believe that God's real. Believe that there is a creator and there's design and there's beauty and there's order and there's meaning to it. That further ask and begs other questions such as if there really is a God and there really is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-wise God, then why does God allow evil to exist? And is it possible that that evil is why the world is in such a mess that it's in? Epicurus, who is a famous Greek philosopher, asked the question basically that if God is good and if he is powerful and if he is all-wise, why does he allow evil to exist? This question and this grappling with this idea of why is what in theological terms is called and philosophical terms is called a theodicy. What do we believe about the world? What do we believe about sin? What do we believe about the fall and the problem of evil in the world today? And how does that relate to how we relate to God? It's a theodicy, it's sin and the problem of evil and it's really trying to answer the question of human suffering, which we all experience. Why is there suffering in the world? If God is a good God, why does he allow us to suffer? If God is a good God, why did he allow sin to enter into the world? And here's the reality is we're making assumptions when we ask that question that suffering is actually that something that God has designed or desires. I think we can all come to a place where we acknowledge that really if there is a God, we believe that there is as Christians, the one thing that we can all agree on is for some reason God has allowed human suffering and has allowed evil because we believe that he is all powerful and we believe that he is all wise and so therefore nothing happens that he's unaware of or that he doesn't allow. The issue is we don't necessarily have the why just because we're asking the question why God would allow it and we don't have the answer to it doesn't mean that there isn't an answer. Alvin Planiega who is a great philosopher and theologian of the 20th century said, just because we don't know the answer to the question why doesn't mean that there isn't one. We're just unaware of it. So the Bible doesn't necessarily give us as followers of Jesus all the answers that we want. There are a lot of questions that I would love to have the answers to. There are a lot of questions that don't necessarily make sense to me and as a follower of Jesus, I don't need all the answers. All I need to know is who God is and his character and that he's given me all the information that I need to know to be able to follow him effectively and more than that, more than just the information is giving me hope. The greatest gift that God gives to us is the gift of hope. And as someone living in the middle of a world that has seemingly lost its mind and gone terribly wrong and is obvious that there are issues and brokenness in this present world, he has given us an understanding and a perspective that we can grasp a hold of in the Bible. It's part of our redemptive story of why things have gone this way and what God's intentions are in dealing with that issue. And here's what the Bible describes, at least from what I can see in the pages of scripture about why the world has gone wrong. Yes, it's the issue of sin, but we have to understand that presently we are living in the world and that this world in this present evil age, as it says in Galatians chapter one, is a war zone. This world right now is a battle zone. It is a war zone, but it was not always so. You see, God's original intention in creating the world and everything in it was to actually create the earth as a temple in a dwelling place where heaven and earth were one and where God could live in constant fellowship with his good creation. Genesis chapter one in verse 31 describes what took place after God created everything. You read Genesis chapter one and we all know that it's the beginning. It's where it says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and then it goes through an exhaustive list of him created everything in six days and declaring over all that he created that it was good. In verse 31 it says, and God saw everything that he made and behold, it was very good. So from God's perspective, when he created paradise, the earth and everything in it, the birds, the fish, the seas, the mountains, the grass, the firmament, the stars and the sun and everything and day and night, originally everything that God created from his perspective was exactly the way he wanted it. It was perfect in its design. It was perfect in its beauty. God's presence filled the earth and when he created mankind, Adam and Eve, it said that they were perfect in the way that God created them as image bearers or imagers in the earth to represent God to His creation and mankind walked in perfect relationship with God and God would actually come in the cool of the day and walk with them and it says that it was all very good. So in other words, the war zone and the battle zone that you and I see in the world today was not how it was originally designed to be and it's not how it was in the very beginning. What took place then to mess up paradise as it was originally created? Well, the pages of scripture tell us that when God created man, he created man as free will moral agents. It tells us that he took Adam and Eve into the garden and he showed them two trees. He showed them the tree of life and he showed them the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and he told Adam and Eve, every tree in the garden belongs to you. Somebody asked me one time, do you believe they were literal trees? I do. And the one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God says you can have all the fruit of all the other trees, it's all yours, but this tree belongs to me. This tree is off limits. Do not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of fruit and evil or the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don't eat that fruit. In the day that you do, you will surely die. Well, we need to understand that death means separation from life and life is God. So God is our sustainer and our life giver. God says the day that you disobey me and the day that you eat the fruit of this tree, death is going to set in. And that's exactly what happened. There were at least three parties that we know that were in the garden. There's God, there's Adam and Eve, and then there is Satan, the great deceiver, who came into the garden, who tempted Eve and made her and tempted her to eat the fruit that God said not to, and when she did it, she then brought it to Adam. Adam willingly did it and they rebelled against God. And what happened is they didn't fall over physically dead in that moment, but death or separation from God and His will set in, separated them from God so that when God came looking for them and the cool of the day to relate to them, to walk with them, to get a report on how things were going in the earth. It says instead they ran from God, they hid from God, and God had to call them out. And when He did, He set a curse on the earth and on Adam and Eve as a result of their disobedience and their sin. And this is what's referred to as the great fall. This is the fall of free will moral agents who rejected God's leadership and they took matters under their own hands and as a result of that death set in, it would take 900 years or so for them to physically die. But death, which is separation from God and a relationship with God, instantly came on the scene and Genesis chapter three lists off the curse that would come and it was the curse that would impact creation itself. It impacted the soil, it impacted the created order, it impacted the spiritual realm where even Satan came under a curse and the fallen angelic beings came under a curse as well as death and disease and even relational separation. This is the origin of where sin and the mess that our world is today came on the scene. The Bible tells us in the book of Romans, it says that sin entered into the world through one man but in much the same way, it spread to all. And so every one of us as descendants of Adam have become recipients of that sin nature. In other words, sin is a virus that entered into human history through our rebellion against God and we've transmitted it generationally to every human being and that sin has affected us on the inside, separated us from God. We're living in a world that is infected by sin down to the very core of every atom and to the very laws of nature have been affected by that. And it's been passed down and manifested by every one of our decisions and rebellion against God in every single one of us. It's an internal issue, it's an internal problem, not an external problem. And as followers of Jesus, when we look at the world, it would be much easier for us to say the world is in such a mess because of that issue over there or because of those people over there but the reality is if we wanna know why the world is in such a mess, all we have to do is look in a mirror. All we have to do is look in a mirror and say, that's where everything falls apart. It's because of fallen human beings. Now, some would ask the question, if God is all wise, why would he make human beings to have free will? If he knew they were gonna fall, he knew they were gonna sin, why would he give them free will? Why did he create angels with free moral agency? Because what we know is that a whole group of angels fell when Lucifer, who was at one time a servant of the Lord in heaven, the arch angel, he rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven to the earth and a third of the angels went with him. Why did God create angels with the ability to choose? Why did he create human beings with free moral agency? You know, Adam and Eve blew it. Why did he allow that to happen? We have to go back to understanding what God's intentions were with creating mankind in the first place and it's this. It's that God wanted love. God is love and for all eternity within the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they dwell in perfect relationship and within a perfect loving relationship and God the Father out of that perfect Trinitarian relationship, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they created the universe to host human beings and then God created human beings in his own image, according to his likeness, and gave them the gift of free choice so that he could express love to them and they could receive it, but also human beings could then choose to love God and obey God back in a family relationship. Ultimately, the reason why God created the physical universe and why God created human beings is because he wanted a family. God has a family in heaven, his Father, Son and Holy Spirit and all the created angels and God wanted a family on the earth so heaven and earth could come together and there's this beautiful coming together of a family, but the only way that God can have a family instead of robots is if the created beings that he made to be his image bearers could either choose or reject love. We could either choose to love God or we could choose to reject God. John chapter 15, Jesus, when he's teaching on this whole subject says, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. You see, love is manifested, not just in our emotions, but in our obedience. So when God said to Adam and Eve, I'm giving everything in all of creation to you, just don't eat the fruit of that tree. What he was saying is I want you to obey me and your obedience is going to be the physical manifestation of your love for me. If there is no choice, there is no love. Now you can have a robot and you can have a computer and you can enjoy artificial intelligence or whatever, but until there is choice, there's not really love. And so God's ultimate goal is a family which requires choice, but God is so wise and he is so sovereign that he's able to create us knowing that we're going to fall, but that's not the end of the story. You see today as Christians, our story that we believe and that we hold to and that gives us hope is that yes, God created everything perfectly, that's paradise. Yes, mankind fell and the world went into a tailspin where sin and death and disease and division became dominant. The Bible describes as spiritual darkness casts a massive shadow over history and it appeared and it still appears as if everything has just completely gone wrong. But as Christians, what we believe is that that is not the end of the story. And it's not the end of the story because somehow we're going to fix the world by ourselves by just improving ourselves from the inside out. This is not self-improvement, this is not self-enlightenment, this is not humanism, that if we just build a better UN or we build a one-world government or we just educate people that mankind can evolve and become so enlightened that we fix all of our problems, this is not a John Lennon song, imagine all the people living in perfect harmony. That's not what this is, this is not some new age, age of Aquarius that somehow we can create. No, our hope is found in the fact that God could have left us under the shadow of darkness and under the dominion of Satan because make no mistake about the Bible describes Satan right now as the God of this world. Much of what's going on in this world is the result of mankind handing the keys of authority that God gave to us over to Satan by our obedience to his temptation instead of loving obedience to God. And we took the authority as regents of God on the earth and we by default gave them over to the enemy and the current evil age is marked by the dominion of Satan and demonic forces that have made slaves of human beings who are subject to death now because of our choices of sin and he leverages our sin and our temptations and our flesh nature and the separation from God against us and has literally turned humanity into a slave race on the earth under the spiritual authority of Satan. That's where we were enter Jesus. God could have left us there and that would have been fair, that would have been justice but yet God chose to intervene. One of the questions that often gets asked when we deal with this issue of why is the world a mess and if God is all good, how come God doesn't do something about all of this? Why are things so bad? Why did God create us the way that he did if he knew we were gonna make a mess of things? Why doesn't God intervene? The answer is this, God has intervened. The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is, yes, the world is a mess and if we can be so honest, you're a mess and I'm a mess and we can't fix it on our own. Left to ourselves, we're like a ship launched out into space that cannot course correct, hopeless but hope has a name and his name is Jesus and the good news is that when God could have left us and let history run its course and he could have let the world destroy itself, God knew that we could never fix our own problem and the problem of sin. It was going to take God stepping in and intervening to restore paradise and the way that he did it was not by sending an angel, it was not by giving us a self-help pattern, it was by coming and entering into history himself and becoming a man, the mystery of godliness. In the incarnation, Jesus Christ enters into human history born of a woman, conceived by the Holy Spirit, enters into history and he came into this world to restore that which Adam destroyed. He came to redeem us, Luke chapter 11 and verse 19, when he's casting out demons, the Pharisees accuse him of doing it under the influence of demons, of Bellzabub, he says this, he says, if I cast out demons by Bellzabub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges but if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Jesus, the son of God coming into human history to redeem mankind back to God and ultimately restore paradise was an act of war against the power of darkness and against the destruction of sin. The gospel is so much bigger than we believed it is, the gospel is so much bigger than just God forgiving us for the wrongs that we've done so that when we die we can go to heaven. No, when he entered into human history it was like special forces entering behind enemy lines to sabotage the strategies of darkness and to destroy its power and to reclaim the authority that has been lost and to reverse the effects of the fall in the very beginning and to bring the world back into its status of being very good. To where heaven and earth once again are aligned and where mankind are brought back into relationship with God forever. This is the gospel, this is the good news. First John chapter three verse eight says whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil for the devil has been sinning from the very beginning so that's where we know it all started. Sin and death and rebellion and destruction didn't even start with Adam and Eve it started in perfect sin in the heart of a created angelic being who rebelled against God. He sinned from the very beginning but then it goes on and it says in verse number eight the reason that the son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. So Jesus came as a declaration of war to the power of darkness. He came and he said you've had rulership for thousands of years and you've made slaves of the ones who were meant to be image bearers and kings and queens of mine in the earth realm but I'm not going to allow it. I'm coming and I'm not just going to speak it I'm actually gonna enter into it. He's the second Adam who's retracing the steps that the first Adam fell and where everything went terribly wrong in the world God himself came walked in human flesh retracing those steps and he came into the world ultimately to redeem you and I that's what the cross is all about. The only way to redeem what was lost was the very death that God prophesied in Genesis if you eat the fruit of the tree that I told you not to you will surely die. Justice demanded death and the only one who could never or who could ever stand fairly and say I do not deserve to die would be a sinless man. Unfortunately there has been no sinless men because sin has been transmitted from man to man to man from woman to woman to woman. This is the importance of the virgin birth. Jesus bypassed the sin nature of Adam being conceived by the Holy Spirit but yet fully human fully God comes into the world lives a sinless perfect life. He's the only human being who could ever stand and say death has no authority over me but yet he willingly puts himself up on a cross accused of all the sins of the world and God took the sins and the penalty of our sin and rebellion and our mess that we should pay for and all humanity and he put all of it on Jesus at one time and one place the only man who never sinned and the Bible says in 2 Corinthians he who knew no sin became sin for us and he died our death on that cross to fully satisfy the justice of God and on the third day God vindicated this man this God man Jesus the son of God and he raised him back from the dead defeating the power of death, defeating the devil defeating darkness and he is the beginning of paradise restored. You see anyone who puts their hope in Jesus Christ and his finished work on the cross can receive that eternal life and just as Jesus was resurrected from the dead as the first fruits of the resurrection anyone who puts their faith and trust in Jesus will also receive eternal life and there is coming a day in the future when God is going to raise those who have died in Christ back to the newness of life on the day that he begins to restore creation in and of itself. You see this great reversal of the fall and the mess that the world is in only started with Jesus' first coming but the hope that you and I have is that God's not done. See God is not done redeeming and restoring his good creation. He started with the problem that's on the inside that's our sin but now he saved us from the inside and invited us to be a part of his renovation process of restoring and redeeming the world to be carriers of that good news and to begin now to do kingdom good works and to live our life in anticipation and expectation that there's coming a day Jesus told us that he's coming again he's going to appear again and when he appears this time he's going to make sin and make an end of sin make an end of darkness make an end of the devil and he's going to reverse the curse and restore the earth and God's good creation back to its original intent. The world is not always going to be a mess. There is hope and the hope is beyond you and I the hope is found in Jesus. The hope is found in God. This is the Christian story. Revelation 21 verses three through four says this it's looking forward in time to that moment when Jesus returns to restore the earth to the way it was supposed to be. He said, I heard a loud voice from the throne saying behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God. It sounds just like Eden. This is the way it was in the very beginning. It says it's going to be that way again. And listen to this. It says he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Is the world a mess? Yes. Why? It's not because God's not good. It's because we're not good. It's because God created everything perfectly and we rejected it and we wanted our way and we were deceived. And between the fall and the moment when Jesus returns you and I are living in a war zone. It's a spiritual battle where the devil is still trying to exert his authority. We're living in what's called the now and the not yet. His kingdom has come when Jesus came the kingdom has come and the spirit dwells in his people and he saved us from the inside out and he's redeemed us to be salt and light that are working for the renewal of the earth but it's not yet complete. There's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make the enemy his footstool. There's coming a day when he's gonna crush his power and his authority. And in the meantime we're living in a spiritual battle which means things aren't always going to be the way that they're supposed to be. It means that there's going to be sickness, there's gonna be disease, there's gonna be tears, there's gonna be weeping, there's gonna be death but we are those who live in the time of darkness even now but the light of the new day has already dawned in our hearts. See we can live in this world with hope, we can live in this world with the knowledge that death really has no sting and the grave has no victory. We can live in this world not living under the dominion slavery to sin but we can be set free in Jesus and we can live our lives in partnership with God as the people of God to renew our city, to offer hope to people who have no hope. Maybe we don't have all the answers but we know who does and we can invite people to know the God who was the one who created paradise, who saw paradise fall but is the God who's committed to paradise restored. This is the good news of the gospel. Romans chapter eight talks about this, it talks about how even creation itself is feeling the full weight of sin and the problem of evil and even the spiritual battle that's being waged in the heavenlies even at this moment it says in Romans 8 verse 18 for I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God for the creation was subject to futility all the way back at the fall not willingly but because of him who subjected it that's Adam and Eve. In hope, there it is, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. There's coming a day when suffering's gonna be put away. There's coming a day when God's going to renew the earth and it's gonna be the Garden of Eden on a global scale. No more devil, no more death, no more sickness, no more disease, no more racism, no more wars. We're gonna be to our swords into plowshares. The lion's gonna lay down with the lamb. We're gonna be people of God. There's not gonna be any more pain, not any more suffering but in this moment we have to be honest and recognize that there still is pain and there still is suffering in the world. C.S. Lewis said that God whispers to us in our pleasure. He speaks to us in our conscience but he shouts to us in our pain. Pain is God's megaphone to a deaf world. So what do we do with the pain and the suffering that we see in the world around us today? Do we become bitter? Do we say, oh, that's just proof that there isn't God? Listen, I think the fact that we all intrinsically know that the suffering and the pain and the loss and the way things are in the world, I think we all know this that the mess that is going on in the world today is not how things are supposed to be. This is not right. If we take God out of that philosophical question and we say, why is the world in such a mess? Then what we have to do is just step back and go, well, I guess this is just the way it goes. We shouldn't even ask the question, why, because it's just it. But the very fact that you and I are wrestling with it, it's like, why would God allow suffering? Means that there has to be some sort of purpose and meaning. The very fact that we look at our broken world and go, it should not be this way, is evidence that there's a higher purpose and a higher meaning and a way that it's supposed to be. You and I have that hardwired into us. It's like, we have never been to paradise, but there's something of paradise in our heart that tells us it's supposed to be different. And when we experience suffering, when we experience loss and when we experience death, the reason why when we go to funerals, the reason why suffering and the loss of our loved ones is so painful, I'm gonna tell you it's because human beings were not created to die and we were not created to say goodbye to people. It's just evidence that the world has gone wrong and it's gone wrong not because God's not good. It's gone wrong not because God's weak. It's gone wrong because we made it go wrong and that wrongness starts inside of us. And the only way that redemption and the only way that the mess gets cleaned up is when we acknowledge that we're part of the problem but God himself is the only solution and we allow our pain and our sufferings and the difficulties that we go through and that we're experiencing in this world point us in the direction of the Creator and the only one who can be a redeemer and a restorer and say, God, I can't do it on my own. I need you. Help me, save me, forgive me and then use me and fill me with hope. If you're a Christian today, you have the greatest treasure, the greatest gift that the world could ever receive on the inside of you. It's the hope that you have in Jesus Christ. That's the good news, it's the gospel. And if you're not a believer in Jesus Christ today, you have a great opportunity. And the great opportunity is you can exchange your mess. You can exchange your sin. You can exchange your pain and your suffering for his life, for his hope in his new beginning that's found in Jesus Christ. I hope you'll do that today. I hope all of us will do that today. I hope all of us will hold tightly to the hope that we have. And instead of looking at God and saying, God, you should have, we look in the mirror at ourselves and say, I don't deserve it, but I'm so grateful for God's grace. I'm grateful that God did not leave us to our own devices, but he came to us and he came for us. This is the good news of the gospel. And this is why I believe, not just that the world's a mess, but this is why I believe that Jesus is the hope of the world. Would you join with me in prayer right where you're at today? Father, we're grateful that you sent your son, Jesus, into a dark and broken world. The price that you paid to come for us and to us, of leaving heaven behind in order to come to a race of people that rejected you, demonstrates the great love that you do have for us. Lord, when we look at the world, it's obvious the brokenness, the mess that we've made of things that's multiplied with every generation and the increase of population, it's not gotten better, it's gotten worse. But we look at it and we say today, we're not the hope of the world, you are the hope of the world. And Lord, forgive us for trying to build our own tower of babbles. Forgive us for trying to make a name for ourselves, forgive us for excluding you instead of surrendering to you and looking to you. God, today we look to you. And we say, you know each and every one of us by heart, you know every part of us, there's nothing hidden from you. God, would you reveal yourself to every heart? Lord, would you break down our defenses? Would you pull back the curtains that we've established? Break down? Set a wrecking ball to the walls that we've erected between you and us and make yourself known to us and give us enough humility to surrender to you. I'm praying for everybody today that does not know the hope that's found in Jesus Christ, that today we would receive the free gift of salvation that you've offered to us, that you purchased in your own blood when you came for us. And Lord, today, mark us as people of hope, prisoners of hope, carriers of hope, to a lost and dying and messy world. We pray this today in Jesus' name. Amen.