Well now, my good friends here, I've just
got off the plane, as it were, and
we had 26 hours sitting in those rigid
planes, well, they're very useful planes, but when
things go too long, you know, then they're
too long.
26 hours is long enough, and I still
don't know whether I'm coming or going.
I hope that I'm coming.
Now, the subject is for a person suffering
from jet lag and high blood pressure and
all the rest of it, is a hard
one, and I swirled when I heard that
I was to speak to you on that
subject tonight.
But you're nice, gracious people, I've just heard
you sing, and I hope you'll bear with
me when I try and do it properly,
in the English sense of the word.
Now, I'd like to read to you just
one verse before we start, so that we
get the biblical cut on this very important
subject.
You see, it's very easy to sing about
the Lord being king, and I know that
God reigns.
I've seen him reign in my life.
But I also know that his reign does
not cut out suffering.
Ask yourself this one question, while I'm reading
the word of God to you.
Why was Jesus crowned king?
He who for the suffering of death, yea,
the death on the cross, was exalted above
all things.
So kingship and sovereignty, the rule of God,
is usually associated with suffering.
Jesus, when he reigns on high, will reign
on high, in the heavens, with his pierced
hands, on high.
And he will show his pierced side, and
he will bear forever the witness of manhood
in him, the witness of the cross.
And that suffering, when you see Jesus in
glory, he's in glory because he's suffering.
I had a very, very painful time of
life, when I was a young man.
And one of the things that I thank
God for, in my Christian life, and that
is the things that we suffer.
Now, I went to a very good brother,
a very good friend of mine, G.H.
Leng it was.
And I talked about all these things, things
that were bothering me and worrying me during
the war, the Second World War.
And he said, nothing at all.
The old man had a nice good beard,
you know, and he was a real brother.
And he said, no, no, not a word.
So I thought, what's the use of pouring
all that into that old man's ears to
get some advice out of him?
And he said to me, at the end,
you know, brother, he said, I'm really happy.
I've been pouring out a tale of woe.
I'm really happy, he said.
I thought he was being facetious, you know,
sometimes English people are facetious, occasionally.
Has been known to happen, my wife says.
So he said to me, yes, I'm happy.
I can see that God is taking care
of your education for us, to get you
exalted one of these days.
As you know, I'd never forgotten that.
Now let me read this word.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this
present time.
Now there's not a person here who doesn't
know what that means, in one way or
another.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this
present time are not worthy to be compared
with the coming glory to be revealed in
us.
What was the secret of the coming glory
of the crucified Lord?
We celebrate today, Easter.
The secret was the past suffering.
The secret of coming glory is bound up
in past suffering.
Now that may not sound a very nice
notion, but believe me, it is.
And I'm going to try and talk to
you about that as best I can, tonight.
Just a word of prayer.
I ask thee, Lord Jesus, to give me
wise lips and useful thoughts.
The thoughts of thine own word, that we
may all be blessed by our few minutes
together around these things.
Amen.
Now, why does God allow it?
Why all the sufferings?
Why does God bring us to glory through
many sufferings?
Why was God himself, in the Lord Jesus,
crowned with glory and honor, because he suffered?
Now, if he is omnipotent, and I believe
he's omnipotent, why doesn't he stop it?
Did he make the world evil?
Did he make things like they are now?
I don't think so.
I think that God made the world very,
very good.
He says of us, he made us, the
work of his hands, very good.
Why did he make us good?
How did he do it?
Well, the reason is, of course, that he
made us.
Are you listening to me?
I want you to watch very carefully and
listen to me.
He made us of his own, you ready,
genus.
It says in the Acts of the Apostles,
chapter 17, that we are the offspring of
God.
The offspring.
Now, that's an old English word, and one
forgets what it means.
It means the same species.
Now, you see, my children are the same
species as their dad and mom.
We can only bring forth, we humans, our
own species, just as apes can only bring
forth apes.
Well, now, God made us of his own
species.
And if God himself, are you listening, was
made perfect by suffering, don't you think you're
going to be made perfect any other way?
You're not, neither am I.
That's definite.
Jesus himself was crowned with glory and honor
by suffering.
Now, I'm talking to you as Christians, because
I don't expect many people who aren't Christians
would stick it out very long with your
worthy pastor and the congregation here, you know,
singing praises of the Lord if you don't
love him.
But you can't talk to non-Christians like
this.
It's easy to talk to you like that,
because you've had the message talk to you,
sit to you so many Sundays, so many,
so long a time.
But when you come to a non-Christian,
he looks at the world and sees it's
awful.
And what are you going to say to
him?
I say as a Christian, you'll be crowned
with glory, same as Jesus was, because he
redeemed you by his own blood.
But what can you say?
With a poor cripple who's been ravaged by
poliomyelitis, and is a wreck of a person.
I studied chemistry and physics with a man
who also studied chemistry and physics.
His name was Frank Lynch.
Now, Frank was ten years older than me,
because he'd been ten years a cripple.
And I used to talk to Frank about
his sufferings.
He was awful, you know.
It was a pain to be with him.
He was always suffering.
The left side was completely gone, paralyzed.
And he said to me, you know, Wilder,
it's all very well for you to talk
to me like you do, but I think
this, if there is a God, he ought
to have made a better job of me
than I am.
You don't think that I'm a good job,
do you?
Well, I told him I did.
Oh, you see, that's only because you're a
hypocrite.
You won't face up to the truth.
But he said, I can't run, I hobble
around, I can't do anything.
I'm a cripple.
Well, I said, okay, if God made you
like that, I'm satisfied.
He said, I'm not.
I am not.
What should you say to him?
I think he said, too, if there is
a God, I think he ought to have
made the world a better place than it
is.
Why did he make those polio bugs that
have made me like I am?
We tried to fight them.
You asked him to heal me, and you,
with his help, can't.
You're both a pretty little omnipotent pair, aren't
you?
You are God and you.
You can't do it.
You'd like to.
Why don't you?
Why can't you heal me?
Why can't you put me right?
Well, I talked to him about healing and
all the other things you know.
But he understood the gospel.
And do you know what he said to
me?
He said, Wilder, I know the way very
well.
You've made it perfectly clear to me that
Jesus died for my sins.
When I see the end coming, I'm going
to be converted.
I'm going to give my heart to the
Lord, you see.
And then, I'll have enjoyed this world and
the next two, and I'll laugh at you.
You've gone through life like a Puritan.
You haven't enjoyed all the things that we
others do.
Although he was a cripple, he did.
He drank a lot, if that's enjoyment.
And that was it.
Do you know what happened?
After I'd finished studying, done my doctor's degree
and all the rest of it, I used
to write to him.
I went and stayed with him.
And he used to write every Christmas.
And one Christmas, Christmas 1944, the end of
the war.
I wrote to him, the usual Christmas card,
got no answer.
No answer, Frank always wrote.
No, no answer.
But about the middle of January, I had
a little letter.
And in those days, he used to put
a little black rim around it, you know.
And it was in his wife's handwriting.
And she said, on Christmas morning, Frank went
into the bathroom to shave.
And I didn't hear anything of him for
a long time.
So I tried to open the door and
couldn't.
So I got the police.
And there was Frank, died in a second,
shaving himself with a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
I've often wondered, you know, if anybody plays
with God like that.
Whether God does give us time.
He didn't give Frank any.
Not that I know of.
Now, what can you say to things like
that?
I mean, these are real problems.
I love singing hymns.
But you know, confronted with problems like that,
to give an answer that's satisfying, and after
all, God's given us a good brain, we
should give satisfying answers with it.
To give the usual sort of stuff, I
can't.
It's too serious.
I read in a German newspaper, oh, it
must be ten, fifteen years ago now, the
following.
It was in Der Spiegel.
Now, even Americans know what Der Spiegel is,
don't you?
It's a sort of a time magazine, but
ten grades down or up, I'll leave to
you.
I personally, I wouldn't like to say up
or down, because they might have me here
for, well, doing things I want not to
do.
They had this as an obituary.
You know what an obituary is, don't you?
A notice of death.
And it was in very, very black ink,
obituary.
And I'm going to read it out to
you.
This is how people think there.
You live here in relative paradise, you know.
About 84% of you people in America
believe in God of some sort or another.
In Europe, it isn't five.
Over 50% of people on the street
do not believe in God, and do not
go to church.
It is not the habit of the European
to go to church.
It is here, I'm thankful to say.
This is what I read in this magazine.
I'm going to read it to you verbatim,
because it's important.
Listen.
Notice of decease.
After a long period of inactivity and illness,
and then in very, very thick black lettering,
God the Lord has died.
As we hear from...
This was the time of the Vietnam War.
As we hear from the war in Vietnam,
you could put in Lebanon, you could put
in Beirut today, it doesn't make any difference.
Continues in all the ferocity.
Napalm bombs fall on the civil population.
Hitler's disciple keys, supported by the USA.
More soldiers die daily.
More people die of starvation in India, China,
Algiers.
Wheat rots in the western silos.
And the churches make collections for a new
coat of paint on their cemetery fences.
We hear that in the kingdom of God
on earth, more and more humans are being
murdered, tortured, robbed of human rights, strangled, burnt
to death, starved to death.
We believe that anybody who is intellectually honest
can come to only one answer and one
solution.
God, who rules all things well, and whom
my soul worships, and who leads me into
green pastures and besides still waters, he is
either absent, ill, has left town, or
dead.
A God who governed all things well in
Auschwitz, Hitler's concentration camp, one of them, the
Warsaw Ghetto, Vietnam, the New York Negro Quarters,
they never forget that.
The New York Negro Quarters does not exist.
He never did his work well.
His job is now open.
He will have to be substituted for by
us.
The future is open.
In very great sadness and distress, signed Ingbert
Lindmann, Doctor of Theology.
Now my friends, you've got to talk to
people like that.
I'm only a person who has been exercising
myself to do that all these years.
So you must think of me as being
a little bit deformed in my character when
I try to talk to people who believe
like that.
What are we going to do about it?
I had my own professor, who was also
an atheist, in Geneva.
I was there 12 years as his assistant
in the medical faculty in the University of
Geneva.
His father had been a theologian who from
his heart believed as your worthy and good
pastor believes.
He was an evangelical man.
But the son, my professor, wasn't.
He was an atheist.
And I said to him, you know, professor,
you're a chain smoker and you have all
the other races which go with it.
What will happen to you is the following.
I tried to talk massively because he knew
the testimony.
His own father was a Christian.
I said, you'll have the flu and it
won't be the flu.
You will die very suddenly.
I shouldn't think it will go a long
time with you.
He was that sort of a person you
can have a good idea, you know.
Not always, but sometimes you can.
I said, you'll have the flu and there
will be towards the end of it, say
three weeks or a month, there will be
an eruption of blood into your lungs and
you will drown in your own blood.
Don't you think you ought to get right
for eternity?
And he laughed me to scorn.
And he said, if I do, it's a
quick way of going.
Only a month or so later, wife telephoned
me to say that he was ill and
he got the flu.
Could I come and see him?
No.
OK.
So I didn't.
Two days later, telephone, he drowned in his
own blood.
Now his wife was Christian.
The agony of that, she knew.
So did his father.
The agony of that.
Now those are the things that you've got
to deal with.
I had another case, excuse me putting these
things here, but I think it necessary that
we not only sing and dance to the
Lord, but we also do some sincere thinking
about what we're coming to.
Because we can come to worse things than
that in less time than it takes to
say Jack Robinson today.
Only a push on the button, you know.
And that's it.
I had a case, I won't take any
more then, then we'll go into the meat
of the matter.
I had a case of a woman coming
to our hospital.
She was a young mother, it was a
prima para, she was having her first child.
And she was in about seven and a
half to eighth month.
And she had a fulminating cancer of the
breast.
Now, that's awful to see.
And I was only a young man.
And I'd never seen one before.
Well, I had to do the blood samples.
So I did the blood samples.
And I talked to this poor soul.
Here she was, seven and a half months
pregnant.
And I told her, you know as carefully
as you can, what was going to happen.
And the thing was whether it was a
race that we could keep her alive until
she bore the child, or the child was
buried with her.
It was a race which was going to
happen first.
So she asked me, she said, do you
think, do you think, doctor, that I'll stand
it?
Well, what can you say?
I said, you want my private opinion?
She said, yes.
So I said, the answer is no.
You've got to be careful, you know.
So she said, would you do me then
one favor?
You've talked to me about the matters of
God, and I'm grateful that you've done so.
Your medicaments aren't helping me anymore, and I
can see you as winning the race.
Would you go to the professor and ask
him to do a caesarean section?
So I said, yes, I will, madam.
I talked to her a lot about salvation.
So I went to my professor and said,
look, patient, number so and so has asked
me, what do you think?
Well, he said, Wilder, what do you think?
So I said, yes, I would.
So he took this poor woman and did
a caesarean on her, and saved the baby,
but he didn't save the woman.
She was dead within 24 hours.
But the joy of her seeing that baby
alive in her arms.
Now, if you go there with a cheap
sort of a gospel, you know, you do
more damage than good.
You've got to go there really in the
wisdom and depth and love and mercy and
righteousness of God to deal with a case
like that.
And the joy of seeing that, that she'd
seen her baby, and she said, no, I
can die.
And she died.
Well, she was in pain, but she died
quite happily.
Now, when you get things like that, you
know, a cheap gospel is cheap.
What was God doing to that woman?
What's God doing to the baby?
Well, the next thing after she'd gone was
the father with a motherless baby.
Now, you think of a father having lost
the wife, bringing his first and only child
to the world and losing under that.
You think of the wisdom required to talk
to a father like that.
All I could tell the poor man was
this, look, I'm sorry, Mr. So-and-so,
but I will give you one word that
may help you.
If you pray about it, it might.
And that is, hereafter you will understand.
I can't offer you any understanding now.
He went away satisfied.
Now, you think what that means.
What was God doing to them?
God was doing in the suffering of the
present time, he was doing an eternal work.
Now, if you look at suffering as a
means of doing an eternal work, then you
look at it a bit differently.
Otherwise, we want to shun and avoid suffering.
Don't we?
I do.
I don't like suffering.
And I don't like to see it.
But I can only stand up to it
if I understand it.
Now, look, if I go to a dentist,
my daughter is just qualified as a dentist,
so I know firsthand.
If the dentist comes to me and he
says, look, I've got a new drill that
works at 200,000 revolutions a minute.
Would you mind if I just tried it
out on one or two of your good
teeth?
They're nice and hard.
Do you think that I could have it
right down to the bottom?
If he were doing a job like that
with me, I couldn't.
I wouldn't either.
I wouldn't sit there not one minute.
But if I got a root treatment, you
know, and a lot of pus on the
bottom of my tooth, I'd be very thankful
for that drill.
Now, the pain would be the same.
But if I knew the pain was curative,
was healing, then I'd put up with it.
And you see, if you can't rationalize pain
and suffering in some way or another, you
can't bear it.
How do you think Jesus bore the suffering
of Good Friday?
Who, for the joy that was set before
him, endured the cross, even the death of
the cross, for the redemption of the world,
he could do it.
But if it was a senseless thing, he
couldn't.
Now, there you get the necessity of using
the instrument that God's given you.
It's one of the biggest instruments in the
body, and certainly the most complicated instrument in
the whole universe.
If you understand the ways of the Lord,
such as Moses did, he understood what God
was doing in the wilderness.
Therefore, he carried it through.
But if you don't understand, in understanding the
man, says the Holy Scripture, you'll never hope
to get ready, you'll never hope to be
able to deal with the problems that we
shall get, and which we do get.
Now that is the preliminary cantor for what
I've got to talk to you about tonight.
And yet I think it's so necessary, because
it's the basis of the Easter joy, isn't
it?
The basis of Easter Sunday is the Lord
suffered the sufferings of death to redeem a
world totally lost and absolutely lost in sin.
And the Lord went through with it, right
to the end.
And the result is, he's been crowned with
glory and joy by God himself, the Father.
As a result of that awful symptom, that
instrument of death, known as the cross.
Okay?
That's how I look at it.
And that's what I say to you Christians.
Difficult to talk to non-Christians like this,
because they don't have the basis for it.
But you have the basis, so I've tried.
Now, you think of this.
Take the case of this poor woman who
died of cancer.
God could stop it, couldn't he?
Otherwise he wouldn't be omnipotent.
God could stop it, but he doesn't.
Now, if I'm working with God, presumably, I
could stop it.
But I can't.
I'd love to.
Of course, I'd pray about the ability to
do that.
But you know, I can't.
Why does God let it go through?
Now, let's look at the, why does he,
he did when he was on earth do
it, but why doesn't he do it, oh
more, oh I'd like to see him do
more.
Yet in his wisdom he doesn't.
Why?
Now, think of the answers that are possible.
Either, are you ready with me now?
Are you listening?
Either he's impotent and can't.
The world says that.
Okay, you Christians, okay, you've got an omnipotent
God, he doesn't do it.
Why?
Why not?
He can't.
Well, that can't be an answer for us,
can it?
He can.
Well, the other answer is this.
Maybe he doesn't care.
Well, if he doesn't care, oh boys, that
puts the whole question of the love of
God in, that puts that into the question
right from the start, doesn't it?
We couldn't accept that one, that he doesn't.
Well, why doesn't he do it?
Surely he doesn't agree with that.
Well, the world says this.
I said I'd try and tell you how
to treat people who don't believe as we
do.
The world says this.
He existed once.
Jesus showed that.
Some of them will even admit that.
But now he's dead.
For practical purposes.
He doesn't do it anymore.
His practical purposes.
He's dead.
Well, okay, if God's dead, can I accept
that from a point of view of my
intelligence?
Well, obviously I can't.
I can't accept that.
Because if I look at a cell under
a microscope and see the way a cell
works, it's a miracle that we take the
next breath, you know.
An absolute miracle.
Any man who knows his way about biochemistry
will tell you that.
So if he's dead, how can he maintain
us?
So I said, okay, it can't be that
he's not omnipotent.
It can't be that he doesn't care.
It can't be that he's dead because we're
maintained.
It must mean that he has another purpose
in not doing the job that we'd like
him to do.
Now, let's look at this in a picture
manner, a manner of picture.
If you look at the world, say, as
my job is as a pharmacologist, to look
at cells.
Say you look at a cell which is
developing its oncogenes and turning over to cancer
in two or three steps.
What does it look like?
It looks like a mechanism.
This is a scientific point of view.
It looks like a mechanism, a cell that's
going wrong, a mechanism that's falling to pieces.
It looks as though it was at one
time, as though it were at one time.
Perfect.
And now it's going downhill.
I like to look at it like this.
When I went to Germany the first time
before the thousand years' kingdom of Hitler turned
up, that was in 1933, one of the
things I used to go and like to
look at was the cathedral at Cologne.
Now, some of you have seen the cathedral
at Cologne, haven't you?
It's marvellous.
It really is good.
And I used to look at this huge
organ, you know, and lovely windows and the
flying buttresses all built in the Gothic style.
I doubt you get people to build like
that today as they did then.
And I used to go as a kid,
you see, and look at this and wonder
how wonderful it was.
And then, of course, Hitler and his gang
got going and the British got going too.
The Yanks got going as well.
And they altered that cathedral quite a bit.
It's in the station yard, you know.
And the station is a place, the railway
line, is a place in war.
It's like the arteries of a body.
That's what you bust up if you can.
So they bust up the railways, but they
also bust up, of course, the cathedral at
the same time.
Now, that cathedral is a very good picture
of what the universe, the universe, the world
is like today.
It's well built.
And the best place that you can see
that it's well built is when it's bust
up.
Do you know that?
The best way to look at a cell
is to take it to pieces.
And when you take it to pieces, you
bust it up.
And not all the king's horses and all
the king's men can put it together again.
So complicated it is.
Now, when it's been busted up, I went
there to see.
I went to Germany in 1946.
And I remember coming in in a military
car from England, from Krefeld, and then motoring
right up to the station.
You could hardly get near the place because
it was so busted.
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
The holes in the road.
The people starving on the streets.
People coming in big and wanted to take
your luggage from you and steal and all
the rest of it.
But what interested me most was to go
into this cathedral again.
So I went in.
You go in at the risk of your
life.
The roof was bombed.
The organ, huge organ, was bombed.
All the steps and the floor were away.
You couldn't get in for heaps of rubbish.
And on the two towers, you know, those
two towers at the end, those beautiful towers,
two bombs had struck those towers, glancing blows.
And those glancing blows had knocked out at
one blow hundreds of tons of masonry.
Huge holes in those towers.
I stood underneath those and looked.
The flying buttress is all gone.
The window's gone.
Everything's finished.
Now, I'm going to ask you this one
thing.
Don't be shocked.
Do you think that I would ever say...
Are you listening?
Do you think I'd ever say that those
architects that built that cathedral must have been
fools to have built it like that?
Do you think that would ever occur to
me?
If I'd asked myself, well, look here, those
fellows that built that place that I saw
15 years, 10 years ago, were nuts to
have built that place, a ruin, well, you'd
take me to the nearest psychiatric couch and
lay me down on it, wouldn't you?
And say, look here, boys.
There's something gone wrong with that computer machinery
up top that he's thinking of things like
that.
Obviously, when I looked at the ruins there,
what did I think of?
Well, I'll tell you what I think of.
The very fact that that was ruined showed
me how well they'd built it.
There weren't any sham walls.
And between the walls, you know, there wasn't
any rubbish thrown in that builders like to
get rid of and put between walls.
It was all built solid, right from the
bottom to the top.
It was ruined.
But even in its ruining, you could see
how well it was built.
Now, if you look at nature, if you
look at yourself, look at how you develop
cancer.
There's a ruination process, if you like.
But you know, right in the opening up
of the ruination process, you can see that
was built.
And do you know what?
It was built for eternity.
That cathedral was almost built for eternity.
But the cell is so built that it's
capable of reproducing itself and repairing itself.
If you lose a bit of information on
your genetic code, you're so built that if
everything else is functioning right, that you can
repair and recover that lost bit of information.
Such as people needed to repair this cathedral,
they needed a means of recovering the lost
bits of information which bombs had made holes
in the walls and things like that.
Now, when I looked at that cathedral, the
last thing that occurred to me was the
architects must have built it badly.
The last thing.
If you were to say to me, look
here, this ruined cathedral shows that there's no
architect.
Again, you would go around to the nearest
psychiatric couch and lay me down well and
truly upon it.
And you're right.
But that is exactly the position.
I learned this the hard way.
I had a professor.
He was a professor of physical chemistry.
And he forbade me to speak one more
word of the gospel in his lab on
the grounds that this world is so badly
made and so badly ruined that there couldn't
be an architect.
Understand me?
Have you got me?
You can't say that because a Rolls Royce,
oh, I'm sorry, a Cadillac for you people.
You can't say that because a Cadillac is
smashed up on the freeway that those people
that built it were nuts.
Or that there was nobody that built it.
And yet that is the atheistic argument that's
put up.
Because this world looks like the cathedral in
Cologne, therefore nobody built it.
That's the atheistic argument.
Have you ever heard what the scripture says
so truly?
That he who says there is no God
is a fool.
You can't argue like that.
The very fact that in the ruination you
see that it was well built.
The very slightest bit of order that's left
in one of those flying buttresses, even though
there's only half a flying buttress left, shows
that the architects built the flying buttress well
and good.
And we're just the same in our body.
You can say, okay, the oncogenes are going
wrong and there are viruses got in, there's
a bit of extra information got in and
some got lost, and you're going into cancer
and therefore there's no architect.
You couldn't argue with more folly than argue
that way.
Okay, now what's the grand question?
And I'm going to solve it now.
The grand question is this.
Why did God allow the cathedral to be
bombed?
Why did God allow his universe to be
ruined?
That's the great problem.
It isn't that you can't say because there's
a ruin, therefore there's no architect.
It's baloney that, I'm sorry.
It's Bosch.
It's, what do you call it, nonsense to
talk like that.
The very fact that in the real nation
you see the order there is, shows you
can't get away with an argument like that.
And you have the Marxists in front of
you, such as I have them regularly in
Germany.
I go to the Marxist universities, they're specialities
of mine, and they love to ask me
to come.
Because they say, you can argue with the
man.
And oh, it's hard argument, but boys, when
you get around, we've already got a group
in one Marxist university there, where there were
three years ago two, two solitary students who
were Christians.
And now we've got a group 15 to
20 strong already working in that university.
And just simply attacking problems like this.
The great problem is, why did God allow
the place to be bombed?
The bombing of it shows how well he
made it.
But the great problem is, why did he
allow illness to come into the world?
Shall I give you that?
I have to do it short.
Because I said, you know, sitting in an
aircraft for 26 hours is very nice, but
it's much too long.
And a sermon might be very nice, but
it can easily be too long.
I wouldn't like that to be said of
me tonight.
Listen to me, just do this one point
as quick as I possibly can, and then
my breath will run out.
And that'll be the end of that.
Look, God says, and I'm coming back now,
I'm going to eat my tail, you see.
I'm coming back to where I started from.
God says the secret of mankind is that
he's God's species.
We are God's.
Jesus said those to whom the word of
God came are God's.
Paul said we are the offspring, the children,
the same species of God.
Now the thing about a God is that
God is free.
God is love.
And you can't have love without a free
will.
If anybody tries to win a wife by
force, that man's in for a great surprise.
If a woman tries by psychological terror, I'm
sorry, they never try that, to get a
man by force, she's in for the surprise
of her life.
There's only one way for me to win
a wife, and I've won a wife 35
years now, and happy is the man who
findeth a wife, who findeth a good thing.
That's my testimony.
Now the great thing about winning, the great
thing about winning, the great honor, the great
glory of man is that he's a God.
But he's a fallen God, he's fallen.
He's got all the attributes of God, he's
intelligent as God in his little way, but
he's a devil.
Because instead of choosing in love the good,
he chooses the evil.
God didn't make evil.
God made us good with the capability of
choosing the good.
God did the same.
He saw that the world needed redeeming, and
that it would cost him his life to
do it.
And of his own free will he said,
no man taketh my life from me, I
give it.
And God himself regards you as more valuable.
I've got to be careful there.
More valuable than God, because he gave his
life rather than lose you.
Now when God does that, it means this,
it presupposes that we have the ability of
choice, and we can choose the good, but
Paul says, it's one of the most difficult
things to do, for the good that I
would, that I do not, and the evil
that I would not, that I do.
Oh, who will save me from this body
of my death?
I thank God through Jesus Christ, my Lord.
The great thing is this, we're made as
gods, and we can choose to do God's
will.
And God's will is perfect and good, and
if we do, it's harmony.
But we can also choose to turn our
back upon him.
And if I turn my back upon the
good, I choose the evil, and thereby the
chaos.
If I turn my back upon the source
of all health, I choose illness.
And what we've done as mankind, as a
race of gods which have fallen, we've chosen
evil rather than good.
And the purpose of this short life that
we have on earth, is to reverse a
wrong choice.
God put in a time loop into eternity.
Here's your eternity going on forever and ever,
where everything is permanent.
And God, in order, when we've made a
wrong decision, a decision which has been made
in eternity can't be unmade.
And so he took us out of eternity,
and put us into time, 70 years.
So that that decision which we made in
paradise, in the eternity of paradise with Adam
and Eve, can be reversed.
And if suffering helps us to come to
our senses, and reverse a wrong decision, we've
done then an eternal good work in the
name of Jesus.
Because he pays us the price of sin.
You see, I've lived amongst Muslim, and I've
lived amongst the post-Christians in the post
-Christian era in Europe.
And there's one thing that man, religious or
irreligious, doesn't know how to do.
That's how to pay his debts.
I don't mean only financially, although I'd include
that.
The great problem of the world today is
that we incur debts that we can't pay.
And the great debt that we can't pay
is the moral debt of sin.
You go to the Muslim, and he says,
I'll try to bring Allah to wink at
my sin.
Allah will know my sin, but he will
act as though he didn't.
That is, he's going to deceive Allah.
So they get round their question, the Muslim,
by saying that Allah will wink his eye
at sin.
You ask him who's going to pay for
it.
Allah asks.
You ask the average man, who's going to
pay for your sin.
He doesn't know.
There is none other good enough to pay
the price of sin but the man of
Golgotha.
So I'm happy on Easter Sunday to try
to give you this little tiny interpretation of
the problem of pain, the problem of suffering.
Suffering helps us to think about these problems.
I don't like suffering.
But if it helps us to resolve the
eternal question, what shall I do about my
sin?
Then I will rejoice in suffering.
Okay?
I'll rejoice in suffering.
So will you.
If you see that God does an eternal
work in you by the blood of Jesus
Christ, who suffered and died and rose again
on Easter Sunday to prove that he paid
the price of sin.
Then what else can we do but rejoice
in the sufferings of Christ to bring us
to glory?
Thank you for your patience with me.