Introduction
Adam was walking around the Garden of Eden feeling very lonely, so God asked him, "What is wrong with you?" Adam said he didn’t have anyone to talk to. God said he was going to give him a companion and it would be a woman.
He said, "This person will cook for you and wash your clothes; she will always agree with every decision you make. She will bear your children and never ask you to get up in the middle of the night to take care of them. She will not nag you, and will always be the first to admit she was wrong when you’ve had a disagreement. She will never have a headache, and will freely give you love and compassion whenever needed."
Adam asked God: "What will a woman like this cost?" God said, "An arm and a leg." Adam said, "What can I get for just a rib?" The rest is history.
The world is not the way it is supposed to be. We live in a world with suffering. We live in a world with sin. We live in a world were people do not always get what they deserve. We live in a world were sometimes the good people suffer and the wicked prosper. Why? Why do we have suffering in the world. If as we read last week that God created the world and it was good, why do we not see it as good now. What went wrong?
Well we get a partial answer by looking at Genesis 3 this morning. We have touched on this issue a few times in past sermons but never really addressed the issue, so I want to do so this morning. I want to use some of the ideas from Genesis 3 and attempt to answer the question, what went wrong.
Free will
Like we suggested last week it all begins with free will. God created a garden into which he placed the man and the woman. He then told them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But he gave them the choice. He did not pre-programme them to either eat or not eat. He created the garden, gave them instructions and then gave them a choice. Adam and Eve and the choice about whether to eat the fruit or not. Why? Have you ever wondered why? Why did God create a tree that was not to be eaten and then put it in the middle of the garden. Why did God make the tree in the first place, wouldn’t we be so much better off if he had never made the tree in the first place. Or if he had to make the tree for some reason why did he put it in the middle of the garden. Why not at the top of a high mountain or in a secret valley with no clear passes in, why put it were it was so easy to reach?
Well I can’t give a complete answer but as I have said before in sermons it all comes down to love. God wants us to love him, but for love to be real it must be chosen love. God wants us to choose to love him, not to be forced to love him, or programmed to love him, but rather to know him and to choose to love him. Pretty obviously if we are to choose to love him then we must be able to choose not to love him. Hence the tree. If love is to be real then there must be a real choice, to love or not to love, to follow or not to follow.
Free will produces sin
The trouble is with free will is that there is the chance that people will choose not to love God and to sin. And as we read this morning that is what happened. Was it inevitable? Did free will inevitably lead to sin. Was there no other option? Was humanity doomed when God planted the tree and gave us free will. No, there was a choice and Adam and Eve chose the wrong one. Free will lead to sin, but inevitably, not as a result of predestination but because of a human choice. Adam and Eve had the choice to obey God or to disobey him and they chose to disobey.
Sin produces suffering
And so we have the consequences. God told Adam and Eve the consequences of their actions. Firstly Eve will experience pain in child bearing and the relationship between her and her husband will be corrupted. The ground will be cursed and man will have to work hard to get his food and he will die. Then they were expelled from the garden of Eden and removed from the tree of life. Before we move to consider this in more detail and what it means lets also notice that there was also grace on God’s part as well. They were not immediately killed and there is the promise of children to the Adam and Eve and the beginnings of a promise that one day the serpent will be defeated, and God does not leave them in their naked condition but provides clothing for them. Although there is judgment there is also grace.
But what about that judgment. What does it mean? Well I think it is partly prescriptive (things that God himself will bring about) and partly descriptive, were God merely describes the inevitable results of the sin. I think the distorted marriage relationship is one of these descriptive things were God is merely talking about what will happen rather than telling Adam he was to dominate his wife. If this is the case which I think it is then it is worth noticing that when Jesus brings redemption and sets things the way they are supposed to be then he would also bring redemption to this relationship that is wrong and restore it what it should be. But that is getting a little off the point of this morning. The point if that the consequences of sin was suffering, both for the man, the woman, their descendants and for the rest of creation. Not only is humanity to suffer because of the fall but creation is to as well. The reading we had from 1 Corinthians suggests that this may even be in a greater capacity than is suggested from just reading Genesis 3. The overall message of God’s message of judgment is one of suffering and wrongness. Relationships are now going to be distorted, there will be pain. Thing are not the way they are supposed to be. To slightly paraphrase Yoda, love leads to free will, free will leads to sin, sin leads to suffering.
Yet is God not being selfish giving us suffering just so that we can love him. Well no I don’t think that is the case because Christians or even just people who believe in God are not the only ones that hold to this idea about suffering being acceptable if it is the price that has to be paid for freewill. It is an a trade off most people who think about these things are willing to make. But rather than look at philosophers, lets look at books and films. Its an idea which has found form in many films and movies. For example, Demolition man is about a utopian society which is not so great because no one has any freedom, they are all told what to do, what job to have etc. And so the characters decide that it is better to live with an imperfect world if they are allowed their freedom. In Star Trek, there is a race of beings that always work together in harmony, have no internal strife, no suffering and do everything they can to share this with the rest of the universe. Yet the borg are not the good guys they are the enemy because they remove all choice and freedom from life. God not only hopes that we would love him but that he loves us and wants the best for us and therefore despite the suffering free will is still best for us.
But we have two different forms of suffering as a result of humanities sin. There is both the suffering of the one who has sinned and also the suffering of others. Adam and Eve had to pay the consequences of their own sins but we also have to suffer because of what they had done. We do not live in Eden, we do not have access to the tree of life because of what Adam and Eve did. But I hear you cry this is not fair why should I pay for the sins of others. Because this is what it means to be free. Think about it for a minute, if we are free to love or not to love, then we are free to sin. But sin in general is about not loving others or God. It is causing harm to others. If God were to stop us harming others then he would have to stop us sinning and there would be no free will. For example if we are free to steal then the one we stole from will suffer, if we are free to kill then the one killed will suffer. But it goes beyond that if sin is not loving someone as God loves us, then when we don’t love as God loves then that means others do not get the benefit of our love and they loose out. Sin inherently causes not just the sinner to suffer but also the sinned against. Is this unfair, well yes it is but it is the consequence of free will. If you stop all suffering then you stop all free will as well.
Problems
Some of you will remember that we looked at Genesis 1 last week. And I was pointing out that Genesis 1 was not written as a tract against evolution but rather was concerned with established God as the creator and the universal God, not a local tribal deity. I kind of the left the evolution / creation debate on the side. But if I am to be honest then I at least have to mention it here this morning, particularly because I gave one my NTC lecturers such a hard time for ignoring the evolution issue in the context of Genesis 3. I can live with evolution and Genesis 1 together but Genesis 3 is much harder to deal with. In actual fact it is far more of a stumbling block to the acceptance of some sort of theistic evolution than Genesis 1 is.
According to evolutionary science we have suffering and death long before humans arrived on the scene. There is also no evidence of a great change in the world after the arrival of man. While we might regard the world as suffering due to what humanity has done now, the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, deforestation, driving animals to extinction, the exploitation. Yes, we might very well say that at present, but how can that be applied to just after humanity sinned or even to the time when Paul wrote. We might look forward to time when the lion and the lamb will lay down together and for the lion to eat grass like a ox, but according to the fossil record there never was a time before meat eaters when only plant eaters existed. In fact the very existence of the fossil record shows that death has happened. You can’t have fossils without death.
So what can we say? Some will come to the conclusion that this means evolution and a very old earth are just not true, there must be another explanation for the evidence. Others will look at the evidence and be convinced of the science and so have to try and find a way to reconcile the science and the theology. They will have to admit that there was death before Adam but question whether there was human death. It all gets a bit intricate and complicated.
However, no matter what you think about evolution or the fossil record, you simply have to accept that things are not the way they are meant to be. In some cases this is easier than others, but it is a matter of faith. Maybe later we will be able to look at different things and say this is that, or this is because of that, or things should be this way but they are like this. But for the moment we cannot and to a certain extent no matter what we come up with is going to be speculation to one degree or another. What we cant say is that things are not the way they are supposed to be. There are consequences to human sin and Christ dealt with those, and we look forward to the time when it will be dealt with.
However, looking at the natural world, does give us one more thing to say on the topic of suffering and that is what is it good for?
Purposes of Suffering
A man found a cocoon of an emperor moth and took it home so he could watch the moth come out of the cocoon. One day a small opening appeared. The man sat and watched the moth for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. To the man it appeared as if the moth had gotten as fat as it could in breaking out of the cocoon and was stuck. Out of kindness the man decided to help the moth. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon so that the moth could get out. Soon the moth emerged, but it had a swollen body and small shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the moth, expecting that in time the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body which would simultaneously contract to its proper size. Neither happened. In fact, that little moth spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It was never able to fly. The man in his kindness and haste didn’t understand that the restrictive cocoon and the struggle required for the moth to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body into the wings so that the moth would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.
Romans 5:1-5 and other references in the Bible tell us that God can us suffering to help us grow. The times of suffering and hardship we go through can teach us dependence on God and help us to grow, as we achieve things with God’s help that we thought we could not do until we were forced to. The persecution that the early church experience helped it to spread throughout all the Roman world as the Christians fled persecution in Israel. However, like not all the suffering we endure is a result of our sin so not all suffering is sent by God to help us grow. However, we can see whatever suffering does come our way as an opportunity to grow.
Some people want to take it further than this and say that suffering is necessary for growth. While there may be something in that for the present time, we must remember that suffering is not the way things are supposed to be. It is as a result of sin.
Conclusions
So what can we say. Suffering is not the way that God wanted the world to be, but is rather a consequence of human sin. However, God does not leave us as we are in a suffering world, but chose himself to come and endure that suffering that we might be free of it. We need to remember that this is not the way the world was meant to be. It was not created this way and we were not meant to live this way. The world is the way it is a result of human sin. But God gives us hope of a new heaven and a new earth for those who are willing to trust him, were there will be no more sin and no more suffering.
