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SERMONThe Supremacy of Christ in an Age of TerrorThe suffering of our world is caused, and has been cured, by God.John Piper
Text: 2 Corinthians 6:10
Topic: Suffering in light of God's supremacy
Big Idea: The suffering of our world is caused, and has been cured, by God.
The supremacy of God in all things—no exceptions
One of the truths of the Bible that we embrace with trembling joy is the truth of God's supremacy in all things. The mission of our church is that we exist to spread a passion of the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples, through Jesus Christ. When we say that, we do not mean: "except in calamities," "except in war," "except when Al Qaeda blows up a building or a train," "except when cancer takes a mom or a child is born with profound disabilities." There are no "except" clauses in our mission statement.
We did not formulate our mission in a rosy world, and then get surprised and embarrassed by the reality of suffering. We did not have our head in the sand. We formulated our mission in the real world of pain and suffering and evil and death. We have seen even among our own people, some very peaceful, but also some very terrible deaths. We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things—all things—for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ, all the time. A passion for God's supremacy—Christ's supremacy (for he is God incarnate)—in all things, all the time.
Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing
None of us who has lived a few decades—for me that means almost six—has embraced this mission without trembling. And none of us has lived this mission for long without tears. We have said it dozens of times here at Bethlehem, and we will say it till we die, that the joy we pursue and the joy we embrace in Jesus Christ is always—always in this world—interwoven with sorrow. There is no unadulterated joy in this world for people who care about others. The Bible describes Christ's servants like this: "[We are] sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2 Corinthians 6:10).
"Sorrowful yet always rejoicing." How can that be? It can be because Christ is supreme over all things forever, but suffering and death remain for a while. Life is not simple. There is pleasure, and there is pain. There is sweetness, and there is bitter suffering. There is joy, and there is misery. There is life and health, and there is disease and death. And therefore emotions are not simple. For those who love others, and not just their own comforts, this complexity means that we will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). And there is always someone we know who is weeping, and someone we know who is rejoicing. And therefore we will learn the secret of "sorrowful yet always rejoicing"—and joyful yet always sorrowing. Those amazing words that describe the Christian soul—"sorrowful yet always rejoicing"—mean that suffering remains for a while in this world, but Christ is supreme now and forever.
9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the constant suffering in this world
The first plane that hit the World Trade Towers, Flight 11, immediately killed 92 people on board that flight. Flight 175, which hit the second tower a few minutes later, killed 65 people on board. In the Towers themselves it appears now that 2,595 people perished when the Towers fell, including those who worked there or visited there, and those who were entering to save them.
Flight 77 carried 64 people when it hit the Pentagon within an hour after the first attack. Inside the Pentagon 125 people died in addition to these 64. Flight 93, with 45 people aboard, turned around over Pennsylvania and was headed … where? The White House? The Congress? Todd Beamer and others wrestled control from the hijackers, it seems, and the plane crashed with no survivors near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All 45 people died. The total fatalities in these terrorist events was about 2,986. We thought that would be the calamity for this message to focus on. But God had other plans. Who can pose the question of God's sovereignty and Christ's supremacy today and leave Hurricane Katrina out of account? What happened in the last week in New Orleans and surrounding areas is different than almost anything this country has ever seen. The September 8, 1900 Galveston Hurricane may have killed more—up to 12,000, we don't know—but it did not displace hundreds of thousands and leave a major city virtually empty and paralyzed with several surrounding smaller towns even more devastated. Who can speak of the supremacy of Christ in an age of terror without considering the terror of 140-mile-an-hour winds and broken levees and floodwaters covering 80 percent of a great city and who knows how many people dead in their attics?
And lest we think naively in response to these calamities, as though the cost of lives was something unusual, let's remind ourselves of the obvious and the almost overwhelming fact that over 50,000,000 people die every year in this world. Over 6,000 ever hour. Over 100 every minute. And most of them do not die in ripe, old age by sleeping peacefully away into eternity. Most die young. Most die after long struggles with pain. And millions die because of the evil of man against man.
Sudden calamities shock us only to make more plain what is happening every hour of every day of your entire life. Thousands perish in pain and misery every day. Probably seven or eight thousand people will have died during this worship service. Some of them are screaming out in pain just now as I am speaking and as you sit there in relative comfort. If there is to be any Christian joy in this world, along with love, it will be sorrowful joy, broken-hearted joy. What person in this room, who has lived long enough, does not know that the sweetest joys, the deepest joys, are marked with tears, not laughter?
Evil and pain as a pointer to the need and evidence for God
So even in our own experience—in our own souls—believers or unbelievers, there is a kind of witness that the world of evil and pain and misery and death is not a meaningless place. It is not a place without a good and purposeful God. Some people, not all, have found in the greatest evil—the time of greatest sorrow—the greatest need for God and the greatest evidence of God.
It happens like this. A great evil happens—say the holocaust with 6,000,000 murders. Or the Stalinist Soviet Gulag with many more than that sent to their deaths. In the midst of these horrors, the human soul, which had been blithely pursuing its worldly pleasures with scarcely a thought about God and with no serious belief in any absolutes like evil and good, or right and wrong—happily living in the dream-world of relativism—suddenly is confronted with an evil so horrible and so great as to make the soul scream out with ultimate moral indignation: No! This is wrong! This is evil!
And for the first time in their life they hear themselves speaking with absolute conviction. They have a conviction of absolute reality. They know now beyond the shadow of a doubt that such a thing as evil exists. They admit that all their life up till then was a game. And now they are confronted with the stark question: If there is such a thing as absolute evil, if there is a moral reality that is above and different from the mere physical processes of evolutionary energy plus time plus matter, then where does it come from, and what is it based on?
And many people discover in this moment of greatest evil that there is only one satisfactory answer: There is a God above the universe who sets the standards of good and evil and writes them on the human heart. They are not purposeless chemical reactions in our brains. They have reality outside of us, above us, in God. Paradoxically, therefore, the times of greatest human evil have often proved for many to be times when God is most needed and most self-evidently real. Without him evil and good are simply different electro-chemical impulses in the brain of mammal primates called Homo sapiens. We know—you know—that is not true.
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