Acts 2:22-36 John 1:1-18

I don't know whether you have thought of it this way, but I would like to invite you to think of it right now. We're involved in a cosmic drama. By that, I mean there is a cosmic war going on between the powers of evil and goodness, the goodness of God. The whole story was written by God and recorded in this book, the Bible, from beginning to end. It has fascinated me that this book was written by forty different authors over a 1500 year period of time. So obviously, they didn't talk to each other. The apostles did compare experiences after Christ. But most of the authors of the Bible didn't know each other. Yet they have put together a complete story of this cosmic drama. God describes the Bible as His Word and He also describes Jesus Christ as His Word. So the two come together  Jesus Christ is the witness that gave birth to this book through His words, His power, His creation and inspiration. It is fascinating, really when you think about it. We sometimes miss the beginning and then the glorious, spectacular ending that is described in here. Many people are afraid to read the book of Revelation because we have had so many myths grow up about that book. But the reality is, it begins with&”anybody who reads this book will be blessed,” and the book of Revelation doesn't really do anything more threatening than summarize this cosmic drama. It tells us that the victory in the end is ours when we are in Christ. The victory in the end is Jesus Christ reigning over all of the cosmos, over all of creation. So there is nothing really scary about that. The only time to be fearful of reading the book of Revelation is when you are a bad person and you never embraced Jesus Christ. It is scary if you don't know Him. It is scary if you reject Him or you reject His Holy Spirit. Then there is a reason to fear the things talked about in the book of Revelation. For the evil person, it is terrifying. Those of us who worship frequently and spend time giving your life in behalf of others, keeping the Great Command  loving God with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind  loving our neighbors as our self, never need to fear this book. There is no reason to fear, for that matter, any of the Bible. Get into it and study this cosmic drama that God, the great storyteller, has written. He has told us the story through the inspiration of those forty authors who contributed the human words of this book. It is fascinating when you think of it that way.

As we read the Bible, we see when God speaks, things come into being. He has created in this book characters that we can all identify with. There are persons who have stories that we can feel with and plots we can find ourselves in. Some of us may identify with the struggle of David against Goliath. Can't that be like the struggle we have with big government, or with corporations at some times in our life? The sins of David are the sins of many. He committed adultery. He was involved in corruption in his running of his kingdom and then he was also guilty of murdering Uriah. We read the life of Paul as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul in some sense may be like every man. He had a conversion experience. He encountered Jesus in that experience. In meeting Jesus, it radically changed his life. In radically changing his life, he found a mission, a purpose, a compassion for others, and a willingness to walk close to 3,000 miles in behalf of Jesus Christ. So any time we are doing a good work in the name of Jesus Christ, we can identify with someone like Paul. There is also in this book a history of suffering. Since the Fall as recorded in the book of Genesis that we talked about last week, people have suffered in many many ways.

I want you to imagine just for a minute how the results of the Fall creates suffering in your own life. Picture that you get a telephone call from one of your high school classmates whom you have not seen in twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. This person says, “You know what? I am in your area and I have a lot of our other classmates with me. We would all like to have supper together. Can you pull it off? Can you meet us at one of the downtown hotels?” You get excited about it and say, “Oh my gosh. I haven't seen or talked to these people since our twenty fifth class reunion. I wonder how they are? I wonder what is going on with them?” So you go to the dinner and as you sit down with five of your closest high school friends, you look around the table and think, “Oh my gosh! They have all aged! (But not me.) How come they look so old?” And they are thinking the same thing about you! Then the next thing you do is say, “Let's start with each person sharing something about our lives.” The first one next to you is named Millie. Millie raises her hand and you see her hand is in a cast. She says, “I've been wearing this cast for months. I have an infection in this arm that I just can't get rid of. No matter what antibiotic they've tried on me, it is resistant to the medications. I can't get rid of it. I am afraid I might even lose my arm.” You go to the next person. The next person is Jack. Jack says, “You know, you all remember that I married my high school sweetheart. You remember her. Well, we recently divorced. It didn't work out. Our life has been so difficult.” You feel compassion. They were voted the ideal couple in their senior year. You thought they would be together forever. Then you keep looking around and there is a classmate named Diane. Diane kind of looks sheepish and glum and says, “I just got my son out of rehab last night. He has a serious drug problem. He has been in and out of rehab frequently and we have our fingers crossed that this time he will be able to kick the drugs forever and make it. But it has been such a struggle.” And you think back when you all signed that senior yearbook and had cute sayings for each other. What happened? What went on in these persons' lives? God never promised us a rose garden. He did promise us a rose garden in His final victory  heaven  but not on this earth.

So what are the reasons that He would allow the Fall? Why would He allow human suffering as a result of the Fall of our original parents? Why does it go on? It is a stumbling block to many in their faith and yet for those of us who know Jesus Christ, it is not a stumbling block but a stepping stone that reveals really important purposes. Look at the suffering that went on in the Bible and how these people maintained their sense of enthusiasm, their perseverance&Paul, especially. He was bitten by a poisonous snake and lived through that. He was jailed on several occasions. He was about to be stoned by a mob and had to be let down the city walls in a basket to escape. Can you imagine the terror he must have felt? Paul also was threatened by many people and when he was in jail, they say that he stood in human excrement up to his ankles. Then he managed in those horrible conditions to write the most beautiful words of his epistles. How did he do that? What were the lessons that came about through the suffering of Jesus Christ? Yes, even the Son of God suffered. He wasn't immune from it either. He endured torturous beatings. He was spit upon. A crown of thorns was placed on His head. But it was through His work that we discover that God permits (He doesn't cause) our suffering so that we will identify our sin and turn to Him in repentance. When we view all of the suffering in the world introduced through the sinful human nature of people, then we can look to God to forgive it. The second thing that is revealed by suffering is the realization of the mercy of God. Yes, we can anticipate this spectacular ending when we all end up in heaven and how joyful it will be. But here in the middle time period between the beginning of it all and the final times when we finally enter the kingdom of God, we are in a stage that is a stage of darkness in most people's lives here and there every now and then. I've said to you before that successful people are those who can go from problem to problem without losing enthusiasm. I really believe that because all of our lives have problems. We don't escape it. But then we discover God's mercy. We discover that He is present for us.

Joni Erikson Tada has written one of the best books that I've read on suffering, When God Weeps. She says that one of the important lessons we learn through suffering is that we discover we don't need things. Things aren't going to help you. If you are laying on your back suffering from a chronic illness, getting a new boat isn't going to feel all that wonderful. If you are laying there with a terrible infectious disease in your arm, receiving a new tennis racket is going to sound like a cruel joke. What we need then are not things. What we need is a person, a caring person, to come into our lives.

Can you remember times in your life when you were comforted by someone, perhaps when you were sick or perhaps when you had a failure in a business? Or perhaps when something went wrong in your life? Maybe it was through a moral failure and yet someone told you about God's forgiveness and that your slate could be totally wiped clean? Can you remember something like that? Can you remember how important it was to have a wonderful comforting person in your life? Joni Erikson Tada said it is like discovering the perfect daddy. She says the Bible says we are to call God the Father “Abba” which is like baby talk. “Abba, Abba, Abba.” You can just hear an infant saying that. We are given permission to identify with the child in us that looks toward God the Father as that loving Father better than any earthly father. We may have had a good father; we may have not had such a good one. But we have the perfect daddy in God the Father. In connecting with Him, we can be comforted through anything. He is always with us. He sits at your bedside when you are suffering, when you are sick, when you are going through great emotional pain or struggle. He is there for you as “a person” who can connect with you and soothe you. That is one of the great wonderful things that we discover in suffering. We discover God's presence. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with turning to God when there is turmoil in your life. I once heard a preacher condemn it saying, “We only go to God when there are things wrong. Why aren't we going to God when things are all right?” Well the truth of the matter is, it is whole lot easier to go to God when things are wrong. That is one of the reasons He allows suffering in this world, so that we turn to Him, we bond with Him, and we have that personal relationship, that connection with Him. Then it is pretty easy to go to Him when things are right. We have joyous celebration here in our worship service on Sunday. We can celebrate the victories in our lives and all the good things. But we are probably less likely to think of them, less likely to think of Him when things are going right. We sometimes become arrogant and attribute our good fortune to our own powers, the things that we did that made things right. So God allows suffering as a corrective to allow us to connect with Him in a most powerful way.

God feels about us. That's identified in scripture. I jotted down some of the feelings of God. Once we have a personal bond with Him, He feels His connection with us and we feel Him. In Exodus 32, we have God angry. That appears frequently in the Bible. Why does God ever get angry with people? Because they sin and His anger is a correction. We can get angry at a little three year-old who starts to run out in the street and maybe even swat that little child's butt. It is painful to the child but it gives the child a loving message. “We care about you. We don't want you to ever be hurt. We don't want you to be killed by a speeding car.” God sometimes allows suffering in our life like a swat on the butt, a loving correction with His anger. Psalm 10 is a psalm about God's compassion, how He feels our suffering with us. Isaiah 62 is about God rejoicing with the Israelites in their successes. God can rejoice with us when we succeed. Jeremiah 43 describes God wailing for the city of Moab. He apparently wails when people fail and sin. Isaiah 63, “In their distress (these are the words of God), I'm distressed.” God reveals Himself as capable of feeling with us and for us. Then He sent Jesus Christ so we make no mistake about His ability to understand us. God became human so we know He understands us. We know as Jesus felt tired, as Jesus felt defeated, as Jesus was persecuted, as Jesus suffered pain, and we go to Him with our tiredness, our suffering, our pain, the way we've been persecuted by others, we can go with confidence that He understands. That makes all the difference. It is no mistake that Jesus' last words to His disciples who were looking up to heaven were, “I will be with you even to the end of time.” So He is with us as a personal God, a personal help when we need Him.

Christ's incarnation made known better than anything else God's care for us and His mercy and forgiveness for us when we need it, want it and ask for it. We are the people who can experience incredible joy. We've read the book. We know the end of the story. We know we can participate in that spectacular vision of heaven as a reality for us when we get there. This is Memorial Sunday and we remember the five persons who died this past year. We can rejoice with them knowing the contributions that they made to our church, and the contributions they made to each of us personally. I look at one of them here, Tom Sefton. Tom Sefton made a point to go around and visit all of our shut-ins several years ago. Surely, God is rewarding him greatly for that. What a neat gift he gave others. Now it is his turn to receive a gift of God as well. Each one of these persons, you remember, I remember the good they've done. I could tell you stories about each of them from having visited them but my sermon would go on too long. So it is time to quit. But be aware that God is here for us. He is a personal God. He allows suffering in our lives so that we will connect with Him and we will appreciate what He does for us. We can appreciate that God can take evil and suffering and turn them into good.