God created a good and perfect world. (Gen 1-2). God’s original purpose, as we see in the Garden of Eden, was for humanity to live in peace and harmony with the world and with God. Amy Orr-Ewing, in her book ‘Where Is God In All The Suffering?’, writes, ‘God, who is love, made a world in which love is possible… and this entails there being a world in which there is the possibility of choice.’ (P 25) The choice made by Adam and Eve to want to be God rather than to love and serve God (Gen 3) has had consequences throughout history which still reverberate today.

Sin is the source of suffering and we live in a world that is broken, a world where ‘the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.’ (Rom 8:22) All the natural disasters, all the illnesses, diseases and death, which plague us and cause us to ask God ‘Why?’ so many times, all the suffering that comes because of human behaviour, have come as a result of sin, and this is why only God’s solution to sin can give us any hope of an answer that will see our heartache, pain, suffering and sorrow resolved one day.

We may feel dissatisfied with God’s answers to this age-old question, but ultimately we see that God has chosen to work redemptively rather than removing all evil and suffering right now. He has chosen to bring good out of evil, to give us hope that is eternal and not limited to the world we can currently see and experience. God’s answers will never eliminate the need for personal trust and personal choice, because that is how God has made us. Any answer also will invariably involve waiting and understanding that perfection will not happen now, but that God will make all things right in eternity. Paul tells the Romans, ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’ (Rom 8:18) He tells the Corinthians, ‘our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.’ (2 Cor 4:17) God tells us that He is preparing us for wholeness, completeness and perfection in Him, for a time when every tear will be wiped away, a time when there is no more death or mourning or suffering or sorrow or pain. (Rev 21:4) That is the hope we have to sustain us now and to help us gain strength to live with faith in a broken, suffering world.

In our series exploring the big questions of life using question words (‘Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?), we reached probably one of the biggest questions of all today: ‘Why, God?!’ So often, we don’t understand what happens in life and ask questions such as ‘Why does God allow suffering? Why doesn’t He step in to sort out injustice? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the wicked seem to flourish?’ We often conclude that either God is loving but impotent (He can’t do anything about evil) or that He is powerful but indifferent (He could do something, but doesn’t care enough to do anything.) Either conclusion is wrong and will lead to resentment, anger and bitterness and will erode our faith.

The question as to why God works the way He does may never be fully answered in this life, but in Psalm 73 and the book of Habakkuk, we see these questions asked honestly and openly before God and learn something of His ways through His answers. The psalmist questions if there’s any point to living a righteous life when the wicked seem to flourish and get away with ignoring God (Ps 73:2-12); Habakkuk asks why God tolerates wrongdoing and how long this must go on for. (Hab 1:1-4)

God’s ways cannot be understood from the perspective of time; we must look further into eternity to understand fully. Only when Asaph entered God’s sanctuary did he begin to see that the wicked will indeed get their just ‘reward’ (Ps 73:17-27); Habakkuk, far from reassured by God’s answer that He could use even the evil Babylonians to achieve His purposes, sees that he must wait for God’s revelation to come. (Hab 2:1-4) Waiting for God’s justice to prevail and for righteousness to dawn like the noonday sun (Ps 37:6) is not easy for us to accept as the answer to our ‘Why?’ questions. We want answers now and we want justice and righteousness to be seen in our dilemmas right now, but the truth is that in a fallen world, where sin has tainted everything, we have to learn to live by faith and not by sight. (2 Cor 5:7) Only God can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts, and both Asaph and Habakkuk ultimately found satisfaction in God Himself, even when they wrestled with doubt and uncertainty. (Ps 73:25-26, Hab 3:16-19)

Most of you will know that I believe strongly that creativity comes in different guises and that we are all creative in some form or another because we are made in God’s image… and God is a creative God! Dearne Churches Together, building on the ‘Advent Angels’ project at Christmas when we gave out 45 knitted or crocheted angels in our community as a symbol of hope in difficult times, is working on an Easter project involving hearts called ‘Whispers of Love.’ The world needs to know just how much God loves each one of us, and this is a way of reaching out to people by giving them a symbol of His love in the shape of a heart. These hearts will be distributed in Thurnscoe, Goldthorpe and Bolton-on-Dearne (and anywhere else where people choose to rise to this challenge!) on Easter Saturday (3rd April) so that people can have a visible reminder of God’s love through a free gift of a heart.

Some people love knitting, crocheting and cross stitch and are offering hearts made in that way:

Some have painted hearts onto pebbles:

Others have taken the wooden hearts we bought and are decorating them in different ways. Some have painted:

Some, especially the children, had fun with glitter and stickers:

Some have even braved the stickiness of decoupage!

Marie Nichols showed us her fantastic art skills in a series of painted hearts:

However people are choosing to create their hearts, we are immensely grateful for all the donations (we are up to about 200 hearts so far and want lots more – there are a lot of people in our villages!) and even more grateful to God for His gifts of creativity and especially for His unfailing love towards us all.

Paul’s appeal to his Roman citizenship shows us that Christians can use the law of the land when facing injustice or illegal actions against them. There are organisations in our country today that help Christians in this way (e.g. The Christian Institute and Christian Concern.) Sometimes, the help may be for an individual (e.g. the Ashers, who were faced with legal action against them because their bakery refused to make a cake which supported homosexual marriage) or for groups of people (e.g. the current action being taken by 122 church leaders against the Government’s edicts closing all places of worship during the first two lockdowns in 2020.) Whatever the individual case, these organisations work with Christians who are increasingly concerned that laws are being misinterpreted against Christianity and that discrimination is made against those who seek to follow Christ.

We may like to believe that the United Kingdom upholds good laws and that those laws will be there to protect innocent citizens, but we need to be aware that there may well be times when we need to either seek the protection of the law or to reform laws which are not in line with God’s ways. Issues connected with euthanasia, abortion, gender and freedom of speech are all areas of concern to God’s people in our society today.

We all appreciate the many benefits we enjoy in our country, including law and order, the right to vote, access to healthcare and educational opportunities. Other issues may well need to be discussed, challenged and worked through, and there will be a range of responses to difficult questions. Sometimes, however, change will only come when God’s people rise up and declare His ways above the world’s way. Historically, all sorts of legislation such as the abolition of the slave trade and the protection of children and adult workers from exploitation and human trafficking have come about because God’s people have campaigned and lobbied for change.

We need to pray for Christians working in Parliament and local councils and for organisations working both to uphold the law and reform the law. Paul benefited from Roman law. We too benefit from many laws which protect us, but we must also be aware that the enemy seeks to destroy freedom and oppose truth, and this can happen when unjust laws are passed. We don’t live in a vacuum. The prevailing culture around us is not necessarily amenable to Christian truth and we must be prepared to stand for truth, even at personal cost.

When we read the Bible, we see that God uses everything in life for His purposes; nothing is wasted. This is particularly evident in the life of Joseph, when we see how even misfortune (being sold into slavery by his brothers, being unjustly accused of impropriety by Potiphar, languishing in prison when the one he had helped forgot all about him) is unable to stop God’s plans to save Israel being fulfilled through his interventions. Everything Joseph went through prepared him for the moment when he was required to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams and become responsible for the administration of food storage and distribution in Egypt.

Throughout the Bible, we see God at work in preparation when perhaps we feel nothing much is going on. Moses spent forty years as a shepherd in Midian and must have often wondered what his early life in the royal palace in Egypt had all been for, but when the right time came, God used his previous connections and the lessons he had learnt since then to mould him into the leader who would see God’s people freed from slavery. David’s time as a shepherd came in extremely useful when there was a giant of a Pharisee to defeat; unfazed by the lion or bear which preyed on his flocks, he was confident in God that this was an enemy who could be defeated (unlike the rest of the Israelites who saw only the size of their enemy.)

In the New Testament, we see how God takes fishermen and makes them ‘fishers of men’ and how he was able to use Paul’s background to make him into a formidable apostle. Tom Wright comments that “Paul was, in short, well qualified for the work God had for him: a Jew of the strictest pedigree and highest biblical training; a Greek speaker and thinker thoroughly at home with the world of ancient philosophy and rhetoric; and a Roman citizen – who knew his rights under the law and was determined to use them as necessary.” (Tom Wright, ‘Acts For Everyone Pt 2’, P 163) Just as God used the historical events at play in the world in bringing forth His Son at that particular ‘set’ time (Gal 4:4), so too he used all that Paul had been through to equip him for the work to which he was subsequently called.

God uses everything for good in our lives, even the events and circumstances which we would happily erase from our history. We can, therefore, be confident even when our lives are not apparently ‘on track’, when we feel that nothing is happening and we are in the wilderness. Who we are, what we go through and what we become are all in God’s hands, and He doesn’t make mistakes.

A disproportionate reaction is a reaction to an event or occurrence which seems out of proportion to the event itself. People’s reactions to spiders, for example, can be disproportionate to the actual threat posed; people with a real phobia of spiders may scream and become hysterical even at the sight of a small, harmless spider, whereas others may not even notice them! Usually, if we have disproportionate reactions to something, it’s because we can’t see it in a rational or measured way; we are influenced unduly by our fears or by the way we have been taught to see that event.

The crowd’s reaction to Paul’s testimony about God sending him to be a witness to the Gentiles seems disproportionate to us as we read this account (Acts 22:21-30). They shouted and screamed at him to the point where he could not continue speaking; they threw off their cloaks and flung dust into the air. Their speech was hostile (“Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!” Acts 22:22). It can be difficult for us to understand at all why their reactions were so violent, and even if we begin to grasp the historical context of the Jewish people, we are still left with responses which cannot really be rationally explained (because God’s purposes were always that the Jewish people would be a light to the Gentiles and that all people would be blessed.)

When we face reactions that seem so out of proportion – a mother snapping at a child’s misdemeanour, a boss yelling at an employee who is only a few minutes late, a friend bursting into tears over what we thought was an innocent comment – we need to understand that what we see is usually only the tip of the iceberg. Jesus said that we speak out of the overflow of our hearts (Matt 12:34), and reactions or responses reveal what is going on much deeper within us. Our reactions reveal the dashed hopes, irrational fears, anxieties and worries which we may well conceal most of the time from other people, but which ultimately influence us to the point where we cannot hide them forever. If a reaction is disproportionate to the event, we need to dig deeper. What is the underlying fear? What is the real issue? It’s too easy to focus on the actual ‘blowout’ or response. Instead, we need to ask God to search us and help us to understand what is really going on: ‘Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.’ (Ps 139:23) That way, we can move forward in asking for and giving forgiveness, in understanding what makes us and other people tick, and ultimately in reacting in ways that reflect the self-control which is a fruit of God’s Holy Spirit in us. (Gal 5:22-23)

Some reactions on an individual and political level are also disproportionate: the fierce antipathy towards Christians shown by some individuals and some countries, for example, reflects not only personal bias but a hostility that has spiritual roots, for the enemy does not want to see God’s kingdom come on this earth. Paul reminds the Ephesians that ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’ (Eph 6:12) We need spiritual wisdom and discernment to understand reactions like this and need to use spiritual weapons to defeat this opposition. (2 Cor 10:5)