 Father, we come to you in Jesus' name this evening. Father, the healer of broken hearts, the one who is willing to come and be broken for us so that we can be brought into a relationship with you, with our father, and we can be, we know that we're sons, we can know that we're daughters of your father because of your son, Jesus, and what he's done for us. So Father, tonight we just ask for anointing of your Holy Spirit on our brother as he shares, if he digs deep, lays a foundation for us to somehow know how to grapple with the problem of pain in your world. And Father, we know that, we know in our minds that you're a God that doesn't want to see this pain, but yet when we're experiencing that pain, it drives us to our knees and we ask our questions of why, why Lord, has this happened to me? Why has this happened to my loved one? And so Father, I pray that over these next two sessions that you could just speak through our brother, Lord, and just use him, use his experience and use his teaching ability. Father, just use him as a vessel for your work, Father. So God and direct his time, Father, pray for good technology to work and flow, Father, and may we just focus on you and what you want to speak to us. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, God bless you, brother. Thank you. So I like to start out with a story because a picture is worth a thousand words. So one time there was a meeting and this brother got asked to close. And so he led this beautiful, flowery prayer and he prayed, he just thought of everybody and everything and prayed for all the needs and just blessed everybody. And as he drew to the end of his prayer, he said this, and Lord, as we slide down this great banister of life, I just ask that all the splinters would be pointed in the right direction, amen. I love that metaphor there because it's such a good picture of life. We start out and it's this adventure, sliding down a banister is one of those thrilling entitlements to childhood that boring adults try to stop, right? Now I'm not advocating that, but it's an adventure. Everybody's, you know, in all the stories, children, it's a big adventure to sneak in. But sliding down, all of a sudden there's a splinter and it's just such a good picture of life. Get on the right screen here. Yeah, the hope and the expectancy we have of a thrilling ride of how things are gonna be when we grow up and the way the innocence with which we look at the world. And then there's the abrupt halt to when suddenly we were plunged into this excruciating pain. And the thrill of the ride is forgotten and we're impaled on these experiences that we have in life. These things we run into that should have been a smooth transition to something else, something to help us along and make our life adventuresome. And instead we're impaled on it. And many times we lose our sight of everything else in life as we curl up and we try to nurse our wounds and we try to grapple with the pain that we're experiencing physically if you're on a banister and metaphorically if you're in life. Pain, it's a noun, but it's a lot more than a noun. It's interesting to me to look at the dictionary and just see what it has to say about it. Physical suffering or distress as due to injury, illness, et cetera. One thing I find interesting is to listen to the kinds of things that we say about the pain, the suffering, the things that go on in our life. And there's been the things that we say, it tells a lot about what our expectations are in the framework that we're made to live in and operate in the world. So physical suffering, right away we start seeing this thing that things are not the way they should be and distress has the idea of, we're calling out for help in this experience. That's just the way we were meant to relate. Physical, there's the distressing sensation in a particular part of the body that's physical pain as in a back pain. And then there's mental or emotional suffering or torment. I'm sorry, my news causes you such pain. It's not something physical, it's something emotional, it's something spiritual, you could say, that we experience. This is the realm that probably most of my experience with pain has been is in the emotional realm and relationships and just personally dealing with the emotional feelings that life and things that have happened have given me, I've been through some physical pain. I've nearly dismembered myself a few times and things like that, but my experience has not been things like cancer or Lyme's disease or those kind of chronic illnesses and such like that. At this point, one thing I wanna say about these talks is I'm not sharing these things as some sort of an intellectual hobby that I have and I'm lobbing answers into the arena from my lawn chair outside where I sit my lemonade. But I'm sharing these things because these are things that I've battled through myself and I'm sharing things that have literally saved my life and have saved my life spiritually and brought me to a place of enthusiasm and hope for life and helped me learn to open myself to God's love and reciprocate that love back. So I'm sharing answers that have helped me cope, I'm not intending to necessarily answer all the objections that could possibly come up that would take weeks, but I'm here to share some answers that have helped me through life, some truths that have reshaped the way I think about the world and my own experience in it and also some things I've learned and trying to help others on that journey. Another thing I wanna say at the onset here is what I share about my personal experience, I have no desire to try to get pity from my audience. The compassion of God the people is a blessing, it's a way we feel God's compassion, but the point isn't here to get you all to feel sorry for me. The reason I share what I do is one tip so that you all know that I've been here, I'm not saying this is from without, but I'm sharing it from within. And these are things personally that I've battled with and also have personally saved my life and also to bring glory to God, to point people to God and share a testimony of what God can do to hopefully inspire you and encourage you to press on in your journey of faith because there is hope. So the talk, as Bryant mentioned earlier, is gonna have basically two parts. Tonight we're gonna deal more with rhetoric, our facts, the things that we think about God and the world, lay some foundational truths that changes the way we think about the world and God and suffering in our relationship with God and the world. And then tomorrow night I plan on telling, talking a little more about things to help us cope because pain is not an intellectual problem, it's an emotional problem. And so facts, truth can lay a foundation, but ultimately we have to have more than just information in order to help us cope and to recover emotionally. So tomorrow night I'm gonna be sharing more some things to help us cope emotionally and I'll be sharing a little more of my own journey through this with God. But pain is a problem because it hurts, whether it's physically, whether it's emotionally, it hurts. And so it is a problem. So we have this term pain, that's when it doesn't feel good. And then we have some other words that go along with this that we'll be using interchangeably as we talk about the subject. Then we have this idea of suffering, an experience of enduring things that don't feel good. And then we have this term evil, which is what we used to describe the situation of things not being the way they should be that causes the bad feeling. And again, I'd like to notice just that the sense that we have when we talk about these things, the starting platform that we have to be able to say this doesn't feel good. Things are not the way they should be, that shouldn't happen presumes that there's a way that things should be. So two basically two different kinds of categories of evil I wanna think about here for a little bit just to draw us into the subject and get us to think maybe outside of what's on your mind and my mind tonight as we think about pain, suffering in our own lives to the rest of the big picture of suffering that goes on in the world. There's circumstantial evil, unfortunate coincidences of impersonal forces of nature. So things just, there's no mind behind it. There's no intelligence behind it or purpose that just things don't work out right. And then there's what I call moral evil, which is suffering that's a result of the mistreatment of one human or a group of humans by another. So there's an intelligence as a purpose and there's an intention behind this kind of evil and it leaves a different message with us about the world that we live in. So just listing off here a little bit some different types of circumstantial evil. So this would include things like disappointments just where we have an expectation or a hope and as some people would say fate, it just, it doesn't fall out that way. Accidents is a similar, similar type of thing. You know, two people are going down the road and one person's tire happens to blow out and throws their vehicle into the path of another. Birth defects, all of us struggled to a certain extent with the degeneration that happens genetically but some are bad enough that it obviously hamper somebody's what we would say their normal life function. Disease, again, is where things are not operating the way they should be. Paralysis, it would be similar of physical debilitation because of an accident usually or a disease. So these are all things that happen, they're a wreckage in our lives you could say because of mistakes, things that are not operating in an orderly fashion. And then we have some more things here to start moving into the environment that we live in carnivorous animals. We don't have a lot of trouble with that now our world is civilized enough that we don't hear many times people are mauled or devoured by an animal. Poisonous animals, snakes, we have bees, some of you at the thought of a bee sting have different feelings than I do because you have an allergic reaction and it is life-threatening forms. So just things like that the unfriendliness of our environment, of our home, the planet that in so many ways is made to fit us. And there's things, we'd say mother nature on the rampage even though I don't believe in mother nature as a personal force, but earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfires these natural disasters that happen that our world that was made to be our home as we as Christians would believe and that in so many ways is our home, is made for us, turns around and aborts us so to speak. It turns against us and we can't survive here anymore. And then ultimately there's death when, whether it's the environment or our bodies things don't work in the way that we would say they should to the point that life ceases to be then there's more moral evil. There's the sensational things like abortion and rape and murder and war, genocide that killing off of one whole people group by another. There's slavery. Right now we're in a time of political unrest and that's an issue that's being dredged back up and we're terrible things done and sadly by people who profess to be Christians, slavery. And these are millions of people, whole civilizations have suffered and died or even perished from the face of the earth under these kinds of things. And I'm at home not to minimize and these are the sensational things. These are the things that hit the headlines and everybody thinks about people going on protests and raise funds to try to solve these things. But then there's a whole another set of people that in a much slower, less obvious way is causing pain and suffering and death physically and emotionally and spiritually in the world. There's things like some reason my animations are hopping around here, there's divorce, homes breaking apart, the relationships and the commitment, the love that was intended to create an environment of nurture and safety is torn apart and people are left to grapple with that in their lives. There's drug babies. This is one that I can rationalize a lot of other things in the world but this is one I cannot imagine why in the world this happens that a newborn baby before has one chance to make a decision of good or evil begins to suffer from the nightmares of withdrawal especially from things like heroin. There's child molestation, children that are used and hurt in the deepest way. There's anger. Some of these start getting closer home. These are not so much out there but they're things that probably all of us have participated in to some extent that it's devastating, it leaves scars on each other. Abuse, simply where I am, my relationship with somebody is mainly for what I get out of it and I use them as a doormat. They are expendable to me for my pleasure and my purposes or to just be gotten out of the way when they're a pain to me whether that's an older person to a child or an adult to another adult or an older person. Broken relationships, just where relationships are trust is lost and things move apart and there's a wound left, church splits. This is a huge one. There's a lot of young people that struggle with enthusiasm for God in his way because of the things that happen in their churches that are not on following, the things that happen that are not Jesus' way in churches. Ungodly leadership and manipulation where I punish other people. I emotionally put pressure on them to do what I want them to do rather than allowing them to be a free agent and choose their actions based on the goals that they have in the fruit that they want to reap from them. So this stuff goes on in the world. All of us have been touched in some way by a few of these at least. Some of us maybe by many of them. Some of the wounds may be deeper, some of them maybe not so much but we all have faced this stuff and we have to deal with how do I live through this and how do I explain this with what the Christian worldview says about God and his world. These two different categories of evil leave us with two distinct impressions about the world we live in. One is the circumstantial evil, there's no mind to it, it's just chaos we could say and it leaves us with the impression that there's no one in charge. It's just we're up for, we're just at the mercy of fate. We're just a victim of our environment. That's the impression we get and the other one is that the wrong person is in charge. There is somebody in charge that is evil and it should be stopped. We have these in the discussions in our society, however much people believe in or don't believe in God. These impressions about the world and about these things that happen comes across and leaves us with these questions about what is going on in the world if no one is in charge or if the wrong person is in charge. How do we deal with that? And while this is a hindrance to people believing in God and Christianity, it's not just a Christian problem to solve. This is something that every worldview has to answer somehow is how do things end up not being the way they should be and how do we cope with it? What do we do about it? I wanna look just through a few worldviews, just superficially and just see what their philosophy about the world and about life, what the implication of it is when we look at what it says about suffering and evil and pain in human experience. So naturalism, things like Darwinian evolution, things like Marxism that basically believes natural forces is all that there is. So basically the implication of that philosophy is that you and all that happens to you is an accident and therefore it's meaningless. Whether you consider it good or bad, you can't really say it has no foundation to say this is good or bad, it just is. And your feelings about that are really rather irrelevant as well. There's no way things ought to be, therefore you cannot say there's anything wrong. You are simply less fit for survival and probably really the best thing you can do for yourself and others is get out of the way. I think that sounds awful, but really that's the logical implication of naturalism. Hinduism and Buddhism, religions that believe in reincarnation so that I have had a life before and I am in this life and I'm experiencing things because of my choices in the last life. Basically the implications of that philosophy is it's your fault. You did something in your former life that created the bad karma that caused this. So if you're a little child and you're being abused and molested or you're left derelict by your parents, your parents both died and you're starving on the street. Sorry, but you did something and you're just, this is the way it is. And hopefully somehow you can at least not go backwards and turn into a frog or something. Islam, Islam believes in a personal God but believes that he, everything is a result of his direct will. Islam does not really believe or does not have a philosophy in ways that really supports free will of humans. It's all the divine will of the law he has made this. And so therefore whatever happens to you is the will of Allah, so suck it up. He has decided that you were the one to be a doormat, so fuck up, consider it an honor and somehow you get to figure out how to deal with it, but Allah has decided this is your law in life and there's nothing to be done about it. New age philosophies, for example, into meditation and things like that and Scientology, their philosophy would basically say it's an illusion. You're just dreaming this up. So by the way, your joy, your happiness is also an illusion. So life really has, they will try to borrow from a Christian worldview and try to give reasons for life to have meaning, but their philosophy does not support that. If you follow their philosophy to its logical end, life has no purpose, no meaning. Good, what we call joy or sorrow really have no absolute reference point. And they're simply an illusion. It's something re-dreamed up and you need to escape the illusion. On the other hand, Christianity does have a unique explanation to make it because one, it believes in a personal God. There's a person that is credited with the way things are. He created things. He set up this whole system. And also it has a unique responsibility to explain this because the claims Christianity makes, especially many traditional Christians today and the reality that exists, they seem contradictory. So I wanna look at that a little bit, some clashing evidence. Among some of the things Christians believe are these things. One, God created all things. God is the embodiment of love and goodness. God is omnipotent. He has all power. God is omniscient. He has all science or all knowledge. God is omnipresent. He is in every place and evil exists. Now, when we were in first grade, we did these worksheets where they would have a banana and a pair of socks and a pair of pants and clothesline. And it would say which one doesn't fit or right away we know the banana doesn't fit because the others all have something in common and the banana doesn't. And this doesn't take much intelligence to look at this list and say, if all the first five things are true, then evil should not exist. If we have a God who created all things and he is the embodiment of love and goodness, he has all power so he can do everything. He is omniscient so he knows everything. He didn't oops, didn't think about that. And he is everywhere so he knows what's going on. Evil should not exist. So that reality that's presented implies that there should not be evil. It doesn't make sense that there's evil then in the world. And so the people grapple with this reality. Why do we credit the beautiful rainbow to God but not hungry starving children? This picture is the picture that put the nail in the coffin of Charles Templeton's faith. He was actually Billy Graham's partner in the beginning of Billy Graham's ministry and through some faith crisis he became at least an agnostic, if not an atheist. You can read a little bit about that, his story, his journey in the case for faith by Lee Strobel, Lee Strobel interviewed him. But this moment is holding your dead baby in her arm because there's a drought and there's not enough water and the baby has perished because of that. Very simple problem for a God to fix, right? Just send some rate. There's things like the Holocaust, massive, unchecked, brutality beyond our description. It's worse than just a human gone bad. There's a supernatural dimension to that kind of evil. And so there's people who, you can't blame them for saying things like this Jew who carved on the wall of a Nazi concentration camp. If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness. Then there's the private things that go on behind closed doors in families, in churches and relationships. There's physical and sexual abuse, molestation. And God supposedly is in every place and he sees this kind of stuff go on. He doesn't stop it. Probably all of us have been at Walmart or someplace like that and seen a parent just slaughtering their child verbally. And something in us wants to just go over there and grab that parent and say, listen, do you wanna know what you're doing? And God sees that going all the time and apparently doesn't do anything about it. This doesn't make sense with a good guy that he lets that kind of stuff go on. There's, so people pray. So there's this good God and so we pray to him and he's supposed to be able to fix our problems. But so we pray for a loved one who's sick, we're dying or for some other need in our life and heaven seems iron, barred shut and our prayer prayers seem like they bounce off the ceiling. We were left in frustration and rage and how what, like, Joe, God, why don't you just answer me? It doesn't make sense with a God that is what the Bible seems to tell us at first. And so you have statements like this by Epicurus, the philosopher, either God wants to abolish evil and cannot or he can but does not want to or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to but cannot, he is impotent. He's limited, he's a good hearted guy but he can't, he's not strong enough. If he can but does not want to, he's wicked. If I stood there with a loaded shotgun on my arm from 10 feet away and watched a Doberman tear your five-year-old child, nephew, brother, sister, grandchild to pieces, would you call me good? No, I have the power, easily the power to stop the whole thing and I sit there and watch. But if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how comes there's evil in the world? This doesn't make sense. And as a philosopher, Epicurus wrestled with that and the Judeo-Christian worldview did not make sense to him. And Epicurianism basically teaches, for a member rate, that basically live for the pleasure now because it's gonna be over and you might as well have a party now when you can. Statements like this one, viewing evil in the world as an arm wrestling match between God and Satan. If God is all powerful, why can't he just defeat the devil? God can do anything, right? God has created everything, right? God is not bound by any rules, right? So why is it that God prefers, and this is where it starts getting twisted if we talk about the Bible's story this way, that God prefers to punish, to destroy evil, not by stopping the devil, but by punishing and torturing everyone influenced by the devil. That starts getting not just a careless picture to God, but an evil picture, an indifferent picture of it, a picture of somebody definitely who's not safe or good or trustworthy. And he's attacking us for something, for being under influence that supposedly I'm presuming their viewpoint on it, can't, we can't help this. So they say, if the religious cannot give a logical answer to this simple question, we cannot take their mythical religion seriously. And just for the point I view this whole thing as a little more like this, for those of you who can't see the PowerPoint, rather than an equal arm wrestling match, this is a bodybuilder wrestling with somebody who is, well, just rather slender. And it's something that God is tolerating. He's allowing Satan to try it, and Satan is in the end going to defeat himself because his way is not, is true, it doesn't work. Then there's things that Christians say, not just the Bible and God's story, but then the people who are supposed to be following God, then we say things that don't make sense, like the Christian narrative, to the traditional Christian narrative, I'm now, please take me right now, I'm not saying this is the historic Christian narrative, but some of the things that have come out of the splits and the philosophies through the years, we have a narrative that doesn't paint a very not good picture of this whole situation either. So this is what it sounds like, the traditional Christian narrative sounds like to a lot of unbelievers. God made everything to bring him glory. He wants human, or he gave human rules to follow. They didn't follow his rules. He has offended and incensed that they're a front to him. He cursed their world and will burn them all in an eternal bonfire for it. He sent his son to earth so he could beat him up instead of us. And whoever applies this credit to their account, the credit of Jesus being beat up instead of us, and is good enough, as some of us believe, to humor him, God, through the intervening misery. We'll get the nod from him when we die and we can escape this world to live in his nirvanic lala land forever. Again, I'm viewing it through their eyes the way this whole thing sounds. So some problems with that is for one, it focuses on God's wrath, not human choice and things happening as a consequence in honor of their choice. And God, it doesn't depict God as the one pursuing and working to free them. It actually pits Jesus and God against each other, like bad cop, good cop, you know, God's there saying, I'm gonna punish these people and Jesus say, no, please don't, please don't, I like them and just really make some nasty pictures of God when we present the Bible's narrative that way. And also it focuses on getting out of this world this flop project, rather than joining a revolution, the kingdom of God, a revolution to restore it. So when we depict the Bible's narrative in that way and really it doesn't help this whole thing at all. And then a lot of Christians would invite people to become followers of Jesus by saying things like, ask Jesus into your heart and he'll give you love, joy, peace and lasting happiness. Well, then when people don't experience that in this life and they turn their backs on God because they say God isn't, he's not following up with his promises. That's part of Dan Barker's, he's the president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation now. That was part of what turned him after being a pastor for 17 years and an evangelist and a musician, he's still getting royalties from his Christian music hero, turned his back on God because it just, it wasn't delivering what it was supposed to. According to the narrative that he had heard, he had been taught about what God's purpose was and what Jesus came for. Then there's things we say like this that just paints a bad picture of God in this whole thing. God planned it that way. We say that, well, it was God's will. So-and-so died, that was God's will. I'm not criticizing anybody for saying these kinds of things. I just think that maybe we could learn some better ways to say it that would help clarify the issues and we'll talk some more about some of that later on in these talks. Then we say things like, well, God answered our prayers and we were able to raise enough money or we had a safe trip or so-and-so healed or whatever. Well, what happened to our prayers when the person didn't heal, when we still don't have any solution to our material need that we have or somebody doesn't repent and surrender to Christ and goes off and lives a life of destruction. What about that? We say God was good and gave us a safe trip, similar type of thing that we say, well, God was good and things turn out well. And that really has a bad implication then when things don't turn out good. So then what was God? So just some things that we say, and I think maybe we say them because we do have a little bit of that perspective, we don't think it through always. So again, I don't mean any criticism towards anybody, but just some things that help us think about and maybe start changing intentionally, changing the way we think and the things that we say. Implications of that basically is that God has predetermined everything, which the Bible doesn't teach. The early church did not believe that. And it really has some really bad implications when we think about people who are not saved and the events that happen in the world. And also gives the idea that God wins sometimes and the rest of the time, what? So if God didn't answer our prayers, didn't give us a safe trip, then how do we explain that? So those kinds of things lends to the confusion in the world. And then there's the things that Christians do. There's the strife and division among Christians. This is something that we've done very poorly over the years about. Now there have been many Christians who have led a life of peace and of peacemaking and working through differences in a godly way. But personally, I have not been a very good testimony at times of Jesus' way by my interaction with people and dealing with differences. This is really the Christian record over the years is horrible with splits and splinters and not just that we do something different, but then we can't get along. We can't respect the other person and we fight back and forth over, well, we'll leave that. Jesus said that the ultimate apologetic, the way that people are gonna know that he is real is by our love for each other and by our unity, by us being one together with God. And so is it any wonder that people struggle with believing in God when the people here to represent him and show be an evidence of his way, his character are not passing the first test there. And then idolatrous lifestyles, the many people call themselves Christians, but don't obey Jesus' teachings. Like he said, if you love me, obey, keep my commandments, do what I said. So those things don't lend a very good picture to a good God in the world. They're not a very good representation of God. It's contradicting evidence. This song is a song was by a rock group called XTC. I don't listen to rock music. I found out about this from another talk and I felt like it's worth sharing because it depicts the struggle that's there about God, about the evil in the world and about the religious strife and contention over him. So this is as if a letter is being written to God. Dear God, hope you get the letter and I pray you can make it better down here. I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer, but all the people that you made in your image, see them starving on their feet because they don't get enough to eat from God. I can't believe in you. Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel I should be heard loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in the amount of tears and all the people that you made in your image. See them fighting on the street and notice what they're fighting about because they can't make opinions meet about God. I can't believe in you. Did you make disease in the diamond blue? Something so horrible and something so good. How did these two dichotomies exist? Did you make mankind after we made you? So his thinking is starting to slide and thinking this can't be it. God has to be a fabrication because of this clashing evidence. And did we make the devil too? We just made this whole thing up. Dear God, don't know if you noticed, but your name is all on quotes in this book. And this crazy humans wrote it. You should take a look at all the people that you made in your image. Still believing that junk is true. Well, I know it ain't and so do you. And then he, notice the harding process continues. He's coming to conclusions and he's no longer struggling, but he's beginning to harden and his mind and his heart is being set against God. I can't believe in. I don't believe in. I won't believe. And then he basically goes to reverse for Apostles Creed and heaven and for hell. No saints, no sinners, no devil as well, no pearly gates, no thorny crown, because you're always letting us humans down. The wars you bring, the babes you drown, those lost at sea and never found. This song depicts, expresses the hard cry of a lot of people who have left the Christianity and turned their back away from God because of the apparent contradiction in the world and who he's presented as. And probably that struggle and those feelings finds a resignation in probably many of our hearts. However much we don't want to give into that, we're tempted to begin to take that perspective on the world and on God at times. I struggled with that deeply. My journey into apologetics was largely to find some groundwork, some guardrails to keep me from going down that road. And I'm thankful for my introduction to many of those things because it kept me as I looked at the disaster in my life from giving into that belief that this is all just a hoax that God can't exist if he doesn't care about me at all. And some songs that I've heard that express that idea one that is a song from back in the seventies or eighties called American Pie and it has this line in there that says, in the three men I admired the most, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it took the last train for the coast. And that's been a battle I've struggled with in my life. It's just like God, just somewhere God just left, just didn't care, just dumped me off and just drove off and I'm left alone, isolated and orphaned in the world. Another song, this is a Christian song that says about my soul being in despair and that crossing that river would find no one there. So I die and I find out that all this has been a joke or that I wasn't good enough for God in the first place and now I have to be punished for it. So what I wanna do is look at the story. What does the Bible say and how does that change the way this all appears in the world? One thing I find interesting is that as we look at the Bible, we find as we look at the different styles of literature, we find that the Bible is over half story. I did a little study here recently, put an Excel sheet together and assigned a description to each one and if you just go by books and just generalize each book as history or poetry or prophecy or law or epistles, it comes out to about 57% of the Bible is story. So I think it's important we should read the Bible that way and story is interesting kind of revelation. It's not saying, here, do this, pick this up, move your hand there, do that with this, but it's inviting us into understanding what's going on so that we can make choices and learn how to become part of it. I think that shows something about God's character right there that God has revealed himself to us in story that invites us to be aware of our surroundings and to make choices about how we're going to relate to it. I'm not gonna go into real depth I'm gonna refer to a lot of passages here but I just wanna generally look at an overview of what the Bible does say as we put it together and we notice some details and then in the end here I wanna go back over those statements about God that God had created all things, he's love, he's all powerful, he's all knowing, he's on mission and look at some maybe some other ways to look at that some truths that don't appear at first about those statements that helps temper our way and really begins to make this whole thing make a lot of sense. So the story begins with a creator of goodness and beauty in Genesis chapter one. One thing I think is important to know about Eastern literature which the Bible was written by the Hebrews and Middle Easterners is that chronology in other words the stacking of events in exact order of happening is very unimportant to them. It's more important to group things together in a way that shows connections. And so whether or not it was literal days and all I don't believe in Darwinian evolution at all but the picture we get as we look at that is there's chaos and God steps in and he begins to sort things out and make order and then make beauty and just ideas, creativity and makes things work together well. And he keeps saying good, good, good as he creates over and over and over that's repeated and twice when he creates humans. Another thing I see as God creates is he is giving to his world. He's not making things simply to be expendable for his use. All of creation is taking God's energy and God's creativity and it brings him glory because it points to him as a giver, as a person who gives. I think that that is an important thing to start with understanding as we look at the Bible story is God's character and the way he made man to be a partner with him is to become important to reign to have dominion by giving and blessing and enriching what's around them and contrast as fallen humans we become the center of things when we lift ourselves up and we bring glory we do it by taking. So we start out with someone who his character is giving to everything around it and he makes things a blessing, he makes paradise. Everything works perfectly ideal and is just an amazing picture. We still use the term Eden to describe something as just absolutely as beautiful and pleasant and works together as ideally as possible. So a creator of goodness and beauty, a giver giving, a community creating community. So God makes statements like let us make man in our image. So in whatever context where you wanna talk about that is the Trinity or is that the heavenly counsel the spirit beings that are around the throne of God, God seeing that together, but God is somebody who does something with, he's at his core, he has a partnership and so he creates then, he creates a partnership, he creates humans to be two different kinds that work together in perfect oneness to create and to rule the world that he created. Also his terminology as he relates to them where he starts out there and he says be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion is obvious terminology that any Hebrew Jewish person, everyone I've heard that studied any of the Middle Eastern culture would say obviously right away somebody would recognize that, oh God's making a covenant right there when he starts into that. Just as much as today in the evangelical world if a preacher is preaching in the evening and he gets to the end of his message and he says and now with every head bowed and every eye closed and then goes on everybody knows right away, oh, he's gonna give an invitation. It's just part of our culture. And so God's terminology is obviously covenant terminology, creating a partnership where we bind ourselves unconditionally to participate in the outcome, the fate of the relationship. We bind together to make something happen and we both are unconditionally going to be partners in the outcome of that relationship but working together. So God is a community and he creates community and working together and sharing in the outcome of labor. This kind of takes that to another level. A lover who desires to be desired which must have free will in order for love to exist. Love and relationships are based on free will that the person doesn't have to. For example, love romance is a big theme in our world and there's songs and poems and all kinds of stories written about our dreams about that and this is how the dreams go, right? So a man goes up to the girl's house, stomps up on the porch in his boots, kicks down the door, pulls a six-shooter out and grabs her by the arm and says, I want you to come with me and live with me and share life with me and whatever else his ideas are about what a wife is to be. So come along with me and he slaps the cuff son, throws her over his shoulder and takes her to his cabin. Is that the way the stories go? Well, that's absurd. It's so horrible, it's almost funny in a way to think that that would be the way the thing would be approached. Instead, as men, we go and even though we would maybe physically have the ability to do that, we'll go with shaking knees and a dry throat and with our head in our hands and ask, plead for a girl to give us the opportunity to build a relationship and then we will go away. If she rejects it, we will go away and sorrow and deal with the hurt that that brings. I think it's because we are little pictures of God's nature, that's how God is and God will not force a relationship with him. Now, some people will say, well, so then God goes and says, well, so if you don't marry me, you're gonna, I'm gonna burn you forever and hell. Well, that's really a bad conclusion there because the story doesn't go that way. The story goes, we are going to marry somebody. We're gonna serve one master or the other and God is pleading us with us to marry him because he wants to set us free and deliver us, protect us from the abusive husband and our world bears testimony to what life is like when we marry the wrong lover. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I think is literally and figuratively a picture of that, that God makes everything work together. He shows them how to begin to do and invites them to go on and create and grow the garden to fill the rest of the earth. And, but then he says, here, you don't have to. You can follow me or you can choose good and evil on your own. I love this statement that God makes as I've began to change my thinking about God. I basically have begun to put on new glasses. And as I look at the Old Testament without this, without viewing God as a me nasty person, I begin to see a whole other side of him that I believe Satan didn't want me to see before and that is throughout the prophets, God is crying and saying, look, I wanted you, I chased you down, I've done everything, I've given you chances and I'll still give you another chance. Please come back to me and stop choosing this way of destruction. And my heart bleeds with God as he says there in Jeremiah 31, I'm gonna make a new covenant and it's not gonna be like the one before because they broke that one, even though I was a husband to them. I stayed faithful to them and I was always there ready to bring them back and restore them to my goodness whenever they would repent. And that picture is all through the prophets in the Old Testament as he talks to Israel about their lifestyle and the destruction that they're experiencing. This one is just a tremendously powerful scene to me. Jesus comes to Jerusalem as he's approaching his death where they will ultimately reject him. And he says, oh Jerusalem, he comes to the city and he weeps over it and says, oh, if you would just know what's gonna happen to you because you've rejected the one who's come to deliver you from your rebellion, they're gonna completely decimate you to completely lay you level with the ground in your children with you because you didn't recognize the one who came to save you and thought he was your enemy. And the scene there is so powerful when we think about free will. Either God created free will, absolute free will that we can indeed choose to follow him, to serve him, to allow him to reign in our lives or else we can choose independence and sell ourselves to Satan or else. This scene is the most ridiculous scene that has ever happened in history because what we have here is we have the God who just thinks and creates galaxies. And he is here crying because these creatures will are resisting his efforts to protect and bless them. That is so powerful to me as I think about this issue of free will. The Bible doesn't come out point blank frame many times and say that I created free will you can choose but it's the picture all the way from beginning to end is that God has given us the opportunity to choose and has pursued us and we are the ones who have run away from him. We are the ones who have sold our world off to the destroyer. Jesus says in revelations, another picture of this, I'm standing at the door knocking. I could kick it down but that's not what I want. I want you to invite me in so I can make your life good. I can redeem you. I can walk with you through your suffering towards redemption but you have to be the one to open the door. Evil is in the world because a product that is not the result of love, free given love is worthless to God. And so he won't force us and he allows us to choose the opposite of goodness. So we have a creator creating goodness and beauty, a giver giving, a community creating community, a lover desiring to be loved. And then we have a villain inciting independence. Satan comes in and he says, hey, God really doesn't have your best of mind. Actually, he's got the blinders on you. He's trying to keep you dumb down so that he'll be the big guy on the block and encourage them to try his way of exalting himself and trying to become the center of all things himself. And as a result of that, we have chosen to step away from God into our own thing and history, the Bible's history, so much of the story of the Bible is not, people say, well, what about Jeff's daughter, you know, what about it? Well, they missed the point of the book of Judges. The point of the book of Judges is to show us the insanity that happens in the world when the classic phrase is, there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. A villain inciting independence and then a treasure sold to a timer. This is an incredibly important thing to understand as we look at the world, as we think about what Jesus came to do, is that by choosing to listen to Satan's advice, we sold ourselves in our world, our dominion that God gave us to him. Romans 6, 16 makes this very clear that to whom you yield yourself servants to obey, his servants you are to whom you obey, whether of sin and the death or of obedience and the righteousness. And that whole passage in Romans 6 goes over this several different ways and forwards and backwards, how this works. We have given ourselves, we've married a husband who is a tyrant and in order to be free from that, we have to marry another and Christ has come to kill the old husband, he's dead and we can choose now to marry Christ into experience his transformation. But we sold the world we live in to the tyrant Satan and we came under his dominion. Temporal evil as well as damnation is what we get paid working for him. Romans 3,23 says that the wages of sin is death. It's what we get paid for doing things Satan's way. We're working for him, we get paid death. A treasure sold to a tyrant and a lover who will stop at nothing to redeem. So the story's not over yet and we have God as the one who is loving but creating opportunity for us to keep coming back. He's always calling and asking and doing everything possible to free us from our situation. The incarnation, this is such an important thing as I think about God in relating to the brokenness and the devastation, evil, the pain, the suffering that we experience in our world. And does he care in all those kinds of things is the fact that God became flesh and lived among us. The book, Bruchko is a story of a missionary who lived among some primitive Indians. I can't remember what continent it was anymore. And he was looking for a way to communicate this guy that God, the word God expressed himself in human form and he lived among us. And he ran into the story in their culture about this man who saw the ants and saw their play. Now hard they worked and sometimes they starved because things were good. And he wanted so bad to fix their problem that he became an ant and crawled down in their tunnels with them and walked their trails and helped taught them a new way to be ants and helping to solve their problem. And he last onto that. And so in their Bible, it doesn't say the word became flesh. It says God became an ant referring to that story. And that's, I love that picture of what God did except it's exponentially more of a contrast to that. That God left his deity, his omniscience. I don't know if I can say his omniscience, but his omnipotence, his ability to be in control and to be honored and glorified and to be in control of all the circumstances and made himself subservient to everything. He came as a baby and had to wait for his mom to change his diaper and hung their naked on the cross in the most shameful human experience that was the intention of the cross wasn't just to execute but to shame and humiliate in order to set us free from the choices that we've made. And so if there was another way to fix this thing, don't you think God would have done it rather than crawled in here and lived in it with us? And so to me, that's a tremendous testimony to the importance God puts on human choice. It's so sacred to him and he respects it so highly he will not override it. He will crawl in here and live with us in it in order to redeem it. Another thing that's imprecious to me about the incarnation is we get to Christmas and there's all the myths and all the stuff and I just sit alone and I think about it. I thank God that God knows my experience, not just because he's all-knowing, but he has been through it to live in a sinker's earth. A lover who will stop at nothing to redeem. And lastly, a restored relationship and realm. A lot of Christians, we talk about the restored relationship, you know, that now we're sons of God and all this, but we don't talk much about the realm unless we're talking about this city on a cloud thing we go to heaven when we die. That's not really what Jesus said. Jesus came preaching and his summary of his mission was the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He refers to his mission here as to set up a society, a revolution to rejoin heaven and earth. Jesus describes his death as an exodus. That's the term that is used there on the Mount of Transfiguration where he's talking with Moses and Elijah about his death. It's the term there, his decease is the word for an exodus, a deliverance from bondage and moving out to a new life. And the term ransom as the idea of freeing us from slavery that we've sold ourselves into. And then he describes his purpose as leading a revolution to defeat the kingdom of hell and to restore the union of heaven, which is God's realm with earth, man's realm. They'll again live together and we share the joy of what we are creating together, man trading on earth and God trading, who knows what all. But that's the way the story ends is not just in Lollaland with God, some place in eternity, but with a restoration now, a group of people now that God is creating to show his goodness to the world and to begin living here the way God intended to marry the new husband to begin living under the direction of the new master now that we're set free from our slavery. So those are some things to, as we look at the story from a deeper realm from a historic perspective, what the early Christians would have believed about Jesus coming and the purpose of God trading and why things are the way in the world. It gives us quite a different slant on those statements we spoke of back there, that God created everything, God is love, God's omnipotent. There's some truths that need to be brought in there because the most powerful lies are the ones that are mostly truths, but there's important parts left out. When I was teaching school this last year in literature class, we studied Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, and that's one of the things that really stood out to me there is that I didn't quote it directly here, but it says that evil often to lead us to destruction tells us honest trifles that it may destroy us in deepest consequence. And that's what that story is full of is part truths that we're given. And that spurred Macbeth to think that he could get away with things and to make himself great through treachery and ended up destroying him in the end. That's so many of these things. There's a lot of truth there, but they're missing some important parts as a part picture and it's being twisted to give God a very bad picture. So I want to, in this last part here, go through a little bit of rhetoric and adjust some of our thoughts about those things. And then we'll conclude for the evening. So thinking deeper, so let's take the one God is all powerful. Well yes, so God is not limited by anyone or anything. Nobody can check him or nobody gave him advice. Nobody can say, hey, what are you doing? You can't do that. But because of God's character, there's some things God will not do. For example, I'm big enough to do a lot of things physically, but because of my character, because of what God has done with my character, I would not do them. The early church believed that God was not good because he had no other options. The bad part of him just couldn't operate, but because he chose and his character uses power in a way that was a blessing to everything. And so we see also that God delegated part of his power to humans. In the creation story, God says over and over, here we go, that he gave the humans dominion over the world and over creation. So God gave a part of his power to humans and he respects human choice. It's up to us what we want to do with that responsibility and he honors us that when we sow, we reap. And if that can work in a positive way, it can also work in a negative way. We choose to sow poorly. We choose to sell our world to the tyrant. We're also going to reap the effects of that. So God delegated part of his power to humans. So while God is all powerful, it doesn't necessarily mean he is going to just override everything. God is not limited by anyone or anything because of his character, there's some things God will not do. For example, override free will. God gave part of his power to humans and so that part of his realm he will not mess with and will not override their choices. And God values free choice supremely and will not override it. We already talked about that. So those are some things that temper our picture here now about God being all powerful. He's not this bully that rules the block by with his fist. God is all knowing. So when we say that, what do we mean? What does that mean as we think about how it applies to our world? Well, God knows all facts. So there's no information that escapes him. God also knows the past and the future. He inhabits eternity. So God knows about things that happened back then and he also knows what's going to happen in the future. He knows what's going to pan out here. And God also knows things about all times and places. So it's kind of like this three-dimensional thing. God knows everything like this, everything that's happening right now, but he also knows everything that's happening right now throughout all times and all places. And so therefore God has all wisdom. He knows all that stuff and he knows how it's all going to work out the best and he has plans and designs and purposes for how this is all going to work out in the long run. So that tempers our thinking as we look at this that God knows everything, but God knows a whole lot more than what we do. And he has information about what works and how things are going to turn out that we can't begin to dream of. If we look at nature, we see that rather obviously. Also, we mentioned this earlier, but God knows by experience what it is to live as a human in a sinker's earth. So while we may not be able to understand everything about why God lets things go on, that does temper us, our thinking about why God allows the things he does is that God's not just sitting back here, pushing buttons or pushing things around with a stick or something from remote control. But he has personally experienced this. He's not making anything happen that he's not willing to put himself through. God is on my presence. Well, yes, God is in every place. God also inhabits eternity. We talked about that before. So he lives in his experience and things that are outside of what we can get our hands on, our minds around. And God is simultaneously in all places in time. So what he's allowing to happen right now, he is also at the same time experiencing and knowing or at least knowing what is going to happen in the future and the past. And so his information, his perspective on things is just unexpressively greater than ours. Nothing escapes his observation or awareness. And then we say, God is good. God is the source of goodness. He's the one by which we define good and evil really. And he is not good because of what he does, but what he does is good because of who he is. We get our reference point from him. We talk about that at the beginning of this talk that when we talk about evil and we say, but this shouldn't be like this. That should not happen. We're starting with a reference point that already is and we're getting that from somewhere. And the Christian world of you tells us we are getting it from a person who is good. And because he is good, everything he does is good. It may not look good at a certain time. It may not feel good, but it's all going to end with a product that is purely good. Evil exists. There are beings who exist in opposition to God's character of goodness. There's a personal side to this. There are people in charge that shouldn't be in charge, so to speak. Happenings occur that are contrary to the goodness God created. But also evil is nothing of itself. It's the corruption of good. You can't describe evil. You can't list off an exhausted list of evil, but you can say, this is good, this is good, this is good, this is good. Evil is nothing in the same way that darkness is nothing. You can't take a bucket of darkness and dump it into the room. You can't have a device that blows or somehow pumps darkness into a room. All you can do is shut out the light to create darkness, same thing with cold. And so evil is nothing of itself. In order to talk about evil, we have to have a foundation of good. And so leads us to the kind of questions that, well, if there's so much evil in the world, how does God exist? But if God doesn't exist, how is there so much good? We also need to remember this, that when we say, this is evil, this is bad, we are determining that. We're deciding that based on our experience from our perspective and our values. So what we are feeling right now and gauging by what we wish was going on. And that is such a, so immature and such a minute perspective on things. And we need to remember that as we think about things that God has purposes that are greater. We'll talk about that tomorrow night. If God exists, why is there so much evil? I talked about that just a moment ago. This is really a good question. But then the question is, if God doesn't exist, why is there so much good? And I feel like, I think that the Bible narrative, well, I don't understand everything about why God created. The Bible narrative understood historically is the only philosophy that gives us a decent reason about both the goodness in the world and the evil in the world. And a solution, a real workable solution of overcoming and surviving it and experiencing redemption of evil. The better something is, the worse it's opposite is. So a good dog is good and a bad dog is bad. But a good man is good in a whole another realm and a bad man is bad in a whole another realm. I would rather meet a bad dog in a dark alley at night in the middle of downtown Philadelphia than I would meet an evil man. And then we step on up to angels. A good angel is a tremendously wonderful thing and a bad angel. But the better something is, the worse it's opposite is. So the more we are able to choose something good, the more beautiful the good we can choose, the worse it's opposite is. Evil exists, but God says it will be defeated and redeemed. That's an important perspective as we follow the Bible's narrative. God says there's more to it than what's happening right now. It is existing now, but it will be redeemed and defeated in the end. So summing it up, as we looked at the story, we realized that God made a good world. That guy created free will, which is part of love. God created love and therefore there must be free will in order for love to exist. God delegated his power, part of his power to humans. And man's choice to be other than God, I'm sorry, that should be other than good, is created a world that's other than good. And we call that evil. And that brings a lot of pain, a lot of suffering to us. And at the same time, we realized that God has entered our brokenness and that God has through his sacrificial death to deliver us from the bondage of Satan and through his teaching and his spirit's power to lead us into the revolutionary behavior of living his way, being part of his kingdom. God has and is redeeming evil now. And ultimately we'll redeem that and when he comes again to bring the complete union of his kingdom, heaven and earth. He brings, however we want to say that, but we inherit the new heaven and the new earth, we're in dwells righteousness. Evil is temporary, it will be judged and ended. I'm concluding here tonight with that. Hopefully that's adjusted our perspective about what's going on, our picture of who God is in all of this. And tomorrow night, Lord willing, we'll apply some of these things and help us learn. I'll share some of how these truths have helped me learn to begin to walk out, living through this, accepting the pain that God's allowed in my life, finding freedom from it and enthusiasm and being able to open myself to this God in his love in my life and to be able to begin to love him back. That journey is not over by any means, but I'm excited. I'm 38 years old, I'll be 39 next Wednesday. And after 39, you all know it comes 40. And there was a time in my life where to be single and 40 would have, if I would have known it was gonna happen, I probably would have had an emotional breakdown. And while my desires for life are not all granted by any means, I'm looking forward to 40. I'm excited to just be okay with the life God has given me and there's so much good that God has brought through my life as I've surrendered to him. So tomorrow night, Lord willing, we'll talk about some answers that I found that have helped me learn to cope and to be able to love God and be part of his revolution. So, Bill, as you were sharing, I thought about, I was touched and moved by how you took a step on a journey of the evil and the sadness and the brokenness of a world. And I was touched too as he took us on that journey of the story. And I just, I took a picture of that slide. It was very touching. I'm just gonna read off those bullet points here again. A creator of goodness and beauty. A giver giving. A community creating community. A lover desiring to be desired. A villain inciting independence. A treasure sold to a tyrant. A lover who will stop it and nothing to redeem. A restored relationship and realm. And then you took us deeper yet, thinking more deeper. And I won't even go across those bullet points, but thank you, brother. And something I thought about too is how, as I look around me and my friends, I know that I've been maybe protected or I haven't experienced some of these deep pains that some of my friends have. I haven't, my body is healthy. I haven't had cancer. I don't have birth informities like my one friend has. And so I didn't know that tonight there was I'm sure tears shed on this call as I was ushed as well. And also I think about the conversation that I have right here in our cafe. I would people, you are atheists and you deal and grapple with these things. So thank you so much, brother, for laying this foundation. It was really touched by that. We also had questions come in as well. So thank you for submitting your questions. Brother Linwood, I see you're up here. Thank you for joining us for this. Linwood is another single brother from Virginia. And he's gonna be, he's got the questions for that have come in from you all. So thank you for submitting those. And Linwood, why don't we just jump right into that? I see Bill sat down. That's fine. You were standing a long time. So yeah, Linwood, far away here. What's the first question? All right, well, yes, thank you so much, Bill. I was really blessed tonight. You did a great job in sharing the beauty of God's story in his kingdom. Thank you. Number of questions here, they're still coming in. But one, maybe a place to start would be a question that came in early on. I'm thinking about creation and how God created us. So here's a question. How do you respond to the idea that God created everyone just as they are? How does this relate to people born with birth defects, disabilities, et cetera? Again, how do you respond to the idea that God created everyone just as they are? Yeah. So one thing I've tried to learn to do is not to try to say things that I can't really prove. So I'm gonna try to stay with what I do feel like I can say. So I don't have obvious debilitating birth defects. But for me, I guess I would say it's a little the same thing as why was I born in the family that I was born into that when God knew that all this stuff was going to go on. And I think that's where understanding that God gave the world to humans to have dominion and we sold it when we chose to obey Satan and Adam and each person we've gone down that road. I don't understand why all that's the way it is but as we understand that we realize that the world is broken because we have given our dominion to the evil one. And so we see debilitation in the world around us. Paul says the whole creation is growing and prevailing together in pain until now. So that's one of those things I would say that God gave free will and things have come out of that. There's brokenness that has come out of the dominion that we gave over to Satan. And yet God and his love has joined and lived in that brokenness with us, experienced it himself and is redeeming it. He will bring good out. We're gonna talk about that tomorrow. I was spending quite a bit of time actually talking about the idea of God as a redeemer and redeeming evil in the world, pain, suffering in the world. So yeah, I don't have an easy answer that explains it all but that's some things I do know that changes my perspective on it. Yes, I appreciate that, beautiful. You know, some of the things that you shared tonight about the character of God and how we know him would not be that way. I'm more understanding if some of these things wouldn't have been, God wouldn't have allowed the world to be the way it is. Toward a new creation and redeeming of all things. Another question here. How can we show deep compassion without promoting self-pity? And this question that came in early on and as you see God in his response in the Old Testament, relational God, maybe that triggers some clues how we can follow his example. How do we show deep compassion to others without promoting self-pity? And just bringing them into the story, so beautiful. So as I look at God, one thing I think about that subject there, God is the God who takes a risk. You know, he puts himself out there and he knows that people are gonna take an advantage of it. And so as we relate with people, it's important that we show love and compassion that are, I wanna say it this way, that we allow Christ's spirit to rule in us in a way that we are able to love and to demonstrate God's compassion to others. So I think it's not just my compassion or me deciding to show it, but it's gonna make me wrestle with my concept of God and his compassion. But, and in doing that, others may use that wrong. They may cling to it and it may become a manipulative thing where they're wanting to have something just to salve a loon that they keep open and things like that. I think in the journey, as in my own journey, as I've journeyed with some other people, you've got to show love and compassion at the beginning. A person needs to talk about what's happening. They need to feel free to come out and say, this is what I've experienced. They need to grieve. We'll talk about that some more tomorrow night. But as you then begin to move towards the deep reality of God and re-inform their minds, their understanding about who God is, and start taking steps, intentional steps of allowing God's truth to help them to forgive and things like that. You're gonna start finding out pretty soon if they're just into self-pity or if they simply need love and companionship and walking through the journey of that. That's just some of my perspective. I don't think there's a lot of clear cutting into this. It's gonna be a risk. People are gonna take advantage of our compassion and our understanding. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'll say thank you. Another question. Man's choices explain what you call moral evil, but what explains circumstantial evil? Why are there earthquakes, floods, disease, et cetera? You touched on that a little bit with man selling himself to another master. Do you have any further comments on this specifically, circumstantial evil? Yeah, I'm experiencing an earthquake here right now. Just the camera's moving a little bit. There we go. Yeah. So I don't know. Again, I don't want to pretend in any way to go explain everything or say why God's doing it. I would be so arrogant and just foolish, but understanding that fact that we sold the world to a superpower that is intent on devouring everything to make himself great. He lives in opposition to God's method of receiving glory. Understanding that opens the door for, it makes sense that there are things like that happening in the world. There are untold consequences that come out of allowing him to have a dominion in our world. I don't know, I don't understand all that, but I just know that that's, it does make sense that there should be chaos when we have somebody like that in dominion in the world. Yes. There's a question that came in about sin entering the world. Did not sin, or we can say for all intents and purposes, evil enter the world through one man or is it really the yangs to goods yin, like one not happening without the other? Should we know that again quickly? Did not sin, or we can say for all intents and purposes, evil enter the world through one man or is it really the yang to goods yin, like one not happening without the other? Hopefully you can sense what someone's grappling with listening tonight there and so. I got the part about it coming by one man, but I didn't get the next part of the argument there. So if you could just give me that last part again, that sin entering by one man or what was the next part? Yeah, or is it really the yin and yang concept, like one not happening without the other? Yeah. I'm not sure if I quite understand the intent of the question either. Yeah. Yin and yang, but the eastern concept of good and evil. Yeah. They have to mutually coexist. You have to have evil in order to balance out, just to bring the balance of the force, sort of the dark side and the light side together. You see that positive world to live in. See that as in comparison to the Christian world. Yeah. I have not studied deeply into the Eastern religions. I've listened to some books. I've read a little bit about them. Well, I'm slow to do that. Like so I know people say, well, you know, so God's glory shines brighter if there's evil, but that really says something bad about God. It says something that God doesn't say about himself. Now I know it pans out that, I should say pans out that way, but the result is that then the more evil reigns in the world, the more that those who choose to follow Christ stand out. But God doesn't really say that kind of thing about himself. God says that he is good and him is no darkness at all. And so the Bible says, the Bible points to is that there's free choice and we have sold to somebody else. Did God create evil and all that? I don't know. I just know that God did create a world of cause and effect of selling and reaping and he gave us dominion and we have chosen what we do about it. That's what I do know about it. I don't understand why Adam's sin has affected all of us. I don't know all that. And that's where things like Christ entering God, living in it with us shows us there's things going on that are so sacred that God will go to great expense not to mess them up. There's such good coming that we're gonna experience and they just to come as he shows his kindness to us through Christ Jesus. I don't know all about that but that's what the Bible does tell us about it. So I'm slow to make predictions about to say that when God had to make a dark side it just that's not the picture God paints of himself. Right, right. Yes, thank you, amen. Yeah, there's definitely some encouraging comments that came through as well. Someone said very much agree with seeing God as a relational person especially in the Old Testament. I've been discovering the same this year too. Thanks for sharing blessings, brother. And other people definitely shared comments of appreciation and blessing. One question that I'd have is relate to understanding the Bible's a story. And I think that was one of the things that brought beauty and clarity to your presentation tonight. And could you give us some helpful ideas or lenses, glasses to put on as we read scripture in the coming days to see God's story, the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus as we read the Bible for ourselves. Yeah, it's a really good question. So honestly, one of the sources that has really been a big help to me in that is Bible project. When I say that a source has helped me, I'm not saying that I would do everything they do, but their approach to reading scripture, that's one thing as I always look listening and I began to, I found out about some of their videos, their Bible outlines, their Bible reading helps or I should say, they're reading through the whole Bible, some of the outlines and stuff that they give about that. I was looking for this. So do they believe in obedience to Jesus? And the kingdom comes through there just really powerfully and that's one of the influences that has helped me begin to look at this differently. I read a book a couple of summers ago called Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes and that helped me a lot with learning to think about it differently. As Westerners, we want information and we take things apart and we analyze and often we forget to put the pieces back together whereas the more holistic approach of the Eastern minds that looks at the pictures and looks at things together and understanding that the Bible was written in that kind of culture and trying to learn to reshape my mind and to zoom out and look at the picture instead of arguing over the technicalities of, especially in the story. Now I believe that there is places where it's spelling out and saying, we'll do this, don't do that kind of thing, but when you're reading the storyline it's really important to think, to try to understand how to look at it as an Easterner and look at it as a story and see what the picture is. So there's lots of things, if you seek you'll find. That's been my testimony. As God has brought, just lots of little influences here and there, discussions with brothers and methodives I've listened to that have helped nudge me along and learning to understand the Bible that way. The big thing to me is that whatever interpretation brings the whole thing together is the true interpretation. And as I head down this road, I'm just finding more and more of the Bible just comes together and it just is packed with meaning and purpose and it's pointing to Jesus and his kingdom and the restoration of things. So thanks for listening to my spiel there. Yeah, I certainly agree that as you seek you'll find. That's seeing the Bible as a story or something that's brought a lot of insight and beauty to looking at who God is and his purposes throughout history. It's exciting. Another thing is I think is important and I haven't done just a great lot of this but reading some church history and learning what the original perspective was on the Bible and was it a story? What were they getting out of it? That's a lot of help because there's been a lot of a lot of just running the Bible through a shredder almost literally in the intervening years since the time of Constantine that really has produced a lot of bad theology and bad fruit. I appreciate how you brought out the fact that God predetermining everything was not an original position of the church. Yeah. Yeah. And just a follow-up question about Yang Yang here, someone said then I'm sorry but I asked the Yang Yang question because there's a point made earlier that evil comes as a corruption of good and then you explain that darkness is not here in and of itself you have to turn the lights off in order to have darkness. I don't believe in any Eastern religion but I was trying to follow that argument that was presented. Just a follow-up explanation, clarification on that. Yeah. One person that I think would have some very good things to say on that is Robbie Zacharias because he's dealt with, he grew up in that area of the world and that was some very good very good explanations on that. Sure. Yeah. And I probably didn't present that question the best the way it was intended. You hit there but I did appreciate how you said that evil is evil is the corruption of good. Yeah. That evil has nothing to work with except there is good to corrupt. Yes, well I'm not sure if I have any more questions I think that's covered in most of them, Brian. I'm assuming you have something that you'd like to bring in here. Yeah, maybe on the lighter side of things, Bill. You know, this is a fairly deep philosophical message and you did it really well. Thank you. Thanks for giving us some resources too. Now you pointed us to maybe there will be some others you can think about even tomorrow at the end of it is books and places to go, whether it be Robbie Zacharias or whatever or you can go to learn more. But yeah, so on the lighter side, I question for you, the other evening I found myself telling my family we had just done a number of trips to Pittsburgh over the last year for our son and we did our last one. We got back and parked in the driveway and I said this, wow, God has given us many safe trips to Pittsburgh back. I heard you kind of pushing on that earlier here in the talk of sometimes we just say things that maybe you are putting God in a good light. Like so if we didn't have safe trips God's not good is what we're almost saying but how do we talk about those things? Yeah, yeah, that's good. And I don't want to split hairs here but I think the reason that way we say things matters is because it's reciprocal. It's because of what we think often and then it also informs our thinking. So it works both ways. I think it's not that we can't, God wants us to celebrate. He's a dad, he gives good gifts to his children. He wants us to enjoy them but he also, there is good in the difficulties and in the hardships and I think that's where we come short is we need to make sure we express that same kind of faith, that same kind of trusting God's goodness that we lift him up and we cry out against the lies that God is absent and that God doesn't care or that God coldheartedly planned this. That we testify, we sign our name under God's that he is good, whatever happens. So when we smash our finger or when the technology doesn't work right or that we hold up God's goodness that God is good and we express and we live out faith in his goodness as we relate to those situations, that expectation that God is gonna do good through this. Not perfect in that but that it's becoming, that's a response pattern we cultivate and that's exciting to me to be able to do that with my students, to be able to speak that truth into their life as we face things in situations. Yeah, man, it's that hope that we have right in knowing that God is our Father and that someday there will be a new heaven and a new earth and there won't be pain and suffering and so it gives us that hope to know we still have a heart of thanksgiving in this hard times. We definitely have our valleys and our dips. That's just human but it's that we pull through because of that hope. It's right around us, there's lots of students and it's a known fact that there's lots of loneliness and depression and it's a result of brokenness and this lack of hope but we have the answer we come through and point them to a good God and Jesus as you pointed out, who wept over Jerusalem and here's this creator of the universal weeping. Like most human, the times that you feel the most human broken is when you're weeping, you're just at the end of yourself and that's what Jesus did. It's amazing that you're, and then the idea of standing at the door knocking and like you said, not knocking down the door, but knocking. So wow, what a savior. Anything else from you, Linwood? There was one question here that maybe wasn't quite addressed yet, just share it for your own. You said lots of people, people aren't leaving. So they're staying on so we don't want to farm this out but people are so interested so yeah, go ahead. Okay, just share if you have any further thoughts. I know you addressed this some in your talk, Bill, but here's the question. Is it because God is bound by some rules, quote unquote, that there was not another way? There must be something that keeps God from simply using force even when dealing with evil and Satan. And it reminds me of that little picture and the question you shared earlier in your talk. If God is all powerful, why doesn't he just defeat Satan right now? In the first place it was a question. Right. So I was a high school teacher and I have students that have a hard time getting things right or they just insist on writing sloppy on their papers, right? Why don't I as a teacher just take their hands and make them right correctly? Why don't I just do it for them or why don't I make them do it? It's because as a teacher I have a higher value and I could do that. But if I did that, I would ruin what I'm there for as a teacher because my goal as a teacher is to grow them to the point where they can do things on their own that I'm doing and essentially a teacher's job is to work himself out of a job, get him, grow his students to where they can do what he does on their own and they don't need him as a teacher per se in their life. And I think that's just a picture of what God is doing. Yes, he's bound by rules, but they're his own rules that God has created. God lives in relationship and partnership and God is not interested in doing it all on his own. And God wants us to join freely ourselves and so therefore his goal and the whole wisdom is that he has built the universe around. If he would mess that up, everything would fall apart. The picture of that in the Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the witch tells Aslan, you know that if you break this, so Edmund has been a traitor and if I don't get to have my right to a kill, all of Narnia is gonna be destroyed in fire and water. Every, the whole way everything is built is gonna fall apart. So I think God is bound by rules, but they're his own. It's because of goodness that he has created that he will not override human free will. That's amazing. And yeah, it's just been powerful to see God's desire, relentless desire to include man in his good work, his work of creation, of new creation, all through the story. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I think that is, I could certainly share more things I appreciated from the message this evening, but I very much appreciate God's pursuit of us. His relentless pursuit of his purposes, a lover who will not stop at anything to pursue his bride, a people, a treasure for himself and his glory. Yeah, I think I'll turn it back to you, Bryant. Thank you, Linwood. Thank you for being part of this. And yeah, thank you, Bill. I was challenged and blessed to be here. For the ones who are listening in, again, you can get the handout for this presentation, this talk on our website, kingfellowshipweekend.org. And also we have the handout for tomorrow on there as well. So Lord willing, tomorrow evening at 10 o'clock, we'll back on here. Hopefully all the electronics rolling in good time. And we can jump into part two up here. So Bill, why don't we just, yeah, why don't we just have prayer here and to wrap this up? Let's pray. Father, we come to you again in the name of Jesus. We thank you, Lord, that we can come boldly to your friend. We know that. We know that, that Jesus, you're there at your father. Our father's right hand, you're interceding for us. And you love us and you wanna see us flourish and grow more into your image, to experience more of heaven on earth, Lord. And Father, so quickly, as our brother has pointed out, we choose the other. We choose, and because you've allowed us to, we choose because our flesh and our brokenness and the world just pulls us in that direction. And so Father, we ask that by your Holy Spirit, by what you've given us, your scripture, your Holy scriptures, the body of Christ to those things that come around us, Father, and give us the ability, the hope, the strength to press on and not to give up. And so Father, just pray, Lord, that the assembly that's gathered here this evening, Father, each one, Father, you know each one. You know the needs of each one, Father. Father, just pray that a special blessing, pray a provision on them, Father, that you would give them an extra outpouring of your Holy Spirit, that you would give them the desire to dig into your scriptures and that you would bring brothers and sisters around them to nurture them, to disciple them, to guide them. And Father, may our hearts just overflow and worship of thinking of you as king, as creator. And as a man, you walked on this earth and cried and experienced what we've experienced. And now in today, you're a perfect high priest. You've walked here before, you know what it's like to be us and you're seated there and God's right hand, and we even see you standing in scripture, standing intimately, intensely interested in your body over there. We thank you, Lord, for that. Father, thank you for this talk, bless brother Bill. Father, pray you'll protect him as well in the tax of evil one, Father, I know that when you venture into things like this, when you talk about, when you expose evil and the brokenness in the world, when you point people to God, to you, Father, to your son, Jesus, that there is spiritual warfare. Father, we pray that you'll protect him in the tactics of evil one more. And bless our time again tomorrow evening. Just give Bill wisdom, know what to share and what not to share, Father. And go with us tonight, Father, and we love you and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, well, God bless you, Bill and God bless everyone that's on here and have a good night.