Perspectives on Suffering & Evil: Christian’s End Goal (1 Peter 1:3-9)                 2009.08.02       Pastor Richard Yu

           My goal is to shape a Christian worldview on suffering and evil by offering at least six Biblical perspectives on the subject matter, and when these six are put together they could support a platform broad enough and stable enough for us to deal with the hard questions and dreadful situations when we encounter suffering and pain. Last Sunday, I started out from the very beginning of the Bible storyline and put forth the first perspective, which says that man’s rebellion against God’s good created order is the ultimate reason why sin and evil and suffering and death came into the world. Today, I want to go to the ending of the Bible’s storyline and give you the second perspective, and that is that God has an end goal in mind for all His people and that goal is for them to be with him forever in heaven instead of to be separated from him forever in hell.

So you see there are two sides to this end goal: one side is the goal to enter heaven, and the other side is to stay away from hell. God is interested in how we live this life on earth; but He is more interested – and indeed, His main concern for us – is our future, after this life.

If you try to figure out or make sense of what’s going on in the present only in this age you cannot begin to make progress because inevitably things will look different yeas from now. If you do not have this hope of the end goal firmly planted in your soul then your horizon would be too small to see clearly what’s really going on in the present life.

This hope of eternity with God is what Peter talks about in 1 Peter 3:3-5. What Peter is saying is that to be born again is to enter into existence in a new world in which there is genuine hope for the future. What is hope? It is the conviction that something will surely happen in the future. But for that conviction to exist and persist there has to be some kind of basis. And here Peter tells us that the hope for a glorious future life rests on the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead and that He will also raise those who trust in Jesus.

Furthermore, this hope is an inheritance; that means those who believe Jesus already have their names written on the will, as it were, of the Heavenly Father; all that He has prepared for His people already belong to them. Therefore we believers are living the present in light of a full possession of the future.

But what’s this future like? All we have to do is to think in terms of the absence of every kinds of evil, decay, jealousy, hatred, illness, cancers, etc.; and on the other hand, the presence of every kind of goodness; as you go back to the beginning of the creation of human when there was no shame, no guilt, no need to hide, total transparency and harmony.

Peter goes on to say that this living hope would be tested, refined through affliction (1 Pet. 1:6-7). Believers can rejoice in the midst of affliction because through these experiences God is refining their faith. And the ultimate result is that at Christ’s appearing the believer’s tested faith will be found genuine and will result in praise and honor and glory. In a marvelous way, James, Paul, and the writer of the Book of Hebrews all echo this same idea, that all present suffering amount to nothing comparing to the future glory (cf. Jas. 1:12; Rom. 8:18; Heb. 11:16; 12:2; Phi. 4:13-14).

The end goal God has set for us is a heaven to be gained, and a hell to be avoided at all cost. Seen in this light, often when the questions concerning pain, suffering, injustice, war, famine, disasters and the like were laid out in front of us our horizons are just too small. We should worry about the wretch devastation of the tsunami; we should worry about the wretch devastation of AIDS epidemic in Africa; but all is nothing comparing to the devastation that is coming from hell.

The understanding of the end of life would reconfigure everything in this life so that even there are sorrows that we do not yet understand, one day we will stand in the presence of God with our resurrection bodies and we will look at everything from a different angel. We will see everything from the triumph of Christ. Many of us are so attached to this world and the things it offers and we scarcely think of the world to come. Yet it is precisely by reflecting often on the joys, beauties, and satisfactions of eternal life in the world to come that we find a hope that empowers us to live fully for Christ today even in the face of suffering and evil.