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Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

David Shin

Why Does God Allow Pain, Suffering, and COVID-19?

I invite you to bow your heads with me as we pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for the Sabbath and this opportunity that we have to seek your face, to study your word, and we pray that as we open the pages of scripture this morning, that you would speak to us, we pray.

Send us the Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts, for we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

I'd like to turn our attention to Habakkuk 1 and verse 13 because I believe that it frames very nicely for us the topic of our discussion today.

Habakkuk says, You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness.

Why do you look on those who deal treacherously, and hold your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he?" Habakkuk is basically asking the question, God, you hate evil.

You're a pure God, a loving God, an all-powerful God.

Then why don't you intervene, especially when the righteous suffer?

Even in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, there's a lot of suffering that's taking place.

Does God have the ability to stop this pandemic?

And if he does, why doesn't he intervene?

Now, a number of years ago, I had the privilege of going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Area, I highly encourage you to visit the museum.

You start out in an elevator, and I'll never forget when I got out of the elevator, it was an eerie silence that was in the hallways because no 1 was speaking.

In many museums I've been to before, there's a lot of chatter, there's noise in the background, but in this particular museum, in my experience, there was nothing but this silence as people were horrified by the scenes that were put before us.

I'll never forget walking into a room that was full of shoes and the room smelled like leather and there was a shoe about this size, it was that of a toddler and it just broke my heart.

The realization of the human suffering and the human toll that took place when 6 million Jews were killed in cold-blooded genocide.

They had a picture of the hair that they would shave from the Jews to line the boots of the Nazi soldiers.

There were pictures of children that were undergoing the most cruel and inhumane experiments by the hand of Dr.

He would place them in scalding hot boiling water, see how long they would live, and then he would place another child in cold water and see how long they would live.

And The lingering question in my mind was why?

If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have the children to do with it, tell me please?

Dostoevsky is asking the question, what is the point and the purpose of children suffering?

Shouldn't God at least intervene and stop innocent children from suffering?

When I got to the end of the Holocaust Museum, there was a testimonial video reel that was running and 1 testimony of a Holocaust survivor I'll never forget.

She talked about how she was in the concentration camps and she was peering through the barbed wire and suddenly a truck went by and out of the back of the truck a child fell out.

The truck stopped, the soldier got out of the truck and threw that child like a rag doll back into the truck and drove off, and she said in that moment she stopped believing in God.

This is a quotation from the former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Ham Koum.

I would say in his name that the Holocaust is final conclusive proof that there can be no God.

If there were a God, He would not be a just and merciful God, but a cruel and unjust God, a God of inequity, not a God who does not slumber and sleep, who watches over his people, or over all, to tribute to God cruelty, injustice, inequity.

We, if I may say so, should do him the favor of denying his existence.

William Lane Craig puts it this way, Undoubtedly, the greatest intellectual obstacle to belief in God is the so-called problem of evil.

That is to say, it seems unbelievable that if an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God exists, he would permit so much pain and suffering in our world.

So we have these 2 attributes that seem to be at odds, the omnipotence of God and the omnibenevolence of God.

In other words, God is all-powerful and all-loving.

And furthermore, add to that God's character.

And the question is, why doesn't God do it?

And Dostoevsky is saying, Look, what about the children?

What is the meaning and the purpose for why God doesn't intervene and stop the suffering of at least children?

Harold Kushner wrote a book, when bad things happen to good people.

And this book came out of a personal experience of Harold Kushner.

He had a son that had a rare genetic disease called progeria.

And progeria hyper accelerates the aging process.

You never grow beyond 3 feet tall, you don't have any hair on your head or body, and you die in early adolescence, all of which happened to Harold Kushner.

And as Harold Kushner was marrying his son, his whole theology and his picture of God came crashing down around him.

And these were the 2 attributes that Harold Kushner could not reconcile.

The all-loving God and the all-powerful God.

Harold Kushner's reasoning went something like this.

If God was really all-loving and all-powerful, he would have kept my son from getting progeria in the first place, much less dying of progeria.

Therefore God can be loving or all-powerful, but not both.

And in Harold Kushner's mind, he chose to believe in a God of love, but not in a God of all power.

In other words, the God of Harold Kushner was a God that cares, and is loving, but is not able to intervene in certain situations, such as progeria.

So from Harold Kushner's experience, he came to the conclusion that God was all loving, but not all powerful.

David Hume put it this way, is he willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Another author summarizes it this way, if God is perfectly benevolent and also omnipotent or almighty, Why is there any evil in the world?

Why does he permit it?" Now, I'd like to spend a little bit of time reflecting on the notion of omnipotence and love.

The Bible is very clear in Luke 1, verse 37, for with God, nothing will be impossible.

Jeremiah 32, verse 27 says, nothing is too hard for God.

And then you have the Genesis account where God speaks creation into existence.

And then on the other hand, you have the attribute of love.

In 1 John 4, verse 8, the Bible says that God is love.

Now, when you reflect more on the attribute of omnipotence, even being all powerful has certain inherent limitations.

In Hebrews chapter 6 verse 18 the Bible says that by 2 immutable things in which it was impossible for God to lie.

So when you look at the nature of omnipotence you can see that even with an all-powerful God, there are things that he cannot or will not do, that is, lie or be deceived.

Now, this is not a limitation, but it does show you that omnipotence, in order to be all-powerful, must have certain boundaries.

Now these are a couple questions that philosophers have asked.

First of all, can God make a triangle with 4 sides?

That's a fascinating question because once you make a triangle with 4 sides, it's no longer a triangle.

Can God make a circle with a square edge?

When you make a circle with a square edge, it's no longer a circle.

Now, I don't really care about these questions very much, but here's a question.

When we look at the nature of love, love assumes or presupposes the notion of free will and choice.

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Why Does God Allow Pain, Suffering, and COVID-19?

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