November 8, 2017 Show with Marc Grimaldi on “Evil & Suffering in a Sovereign God’s World in light of the Sutherland Springs, Texas Massacre at First Baptist Church”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this eighth day of November 2017.

I'm delighted to have back as a returning guest today, Pastor Mark Grimaldi, who is one of two pastors at Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island located in Merrick, New York. He's also the author of several books and we are going to be addressing one of them once again.

We already had addressed this theme with Pastor Mark very recently. His book is titled Evil and Suffering in a Sovereign God's World. Well, today we are going to apply the biblical truths found in the pages of that book to the Sutherland Springs, Texas massacre at First Baptist Church, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to.

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Mark Grimaldi. Thank you, Chris. Always a.

Pleasure. Appreciate it. And before we go into the subject of the book, I'll tell our listeners something about Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick.

Yes, Grace Reformed Baptist Church, as it says in the name, we are a Reformed Baptist Church of the solace of the Reformation. Our confession of faith is the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, and certainly we would love anyone to come and visit us right here in Merrick and Long Island.

And that is.

The church that I was last a member at before relocating to Pennsylvania and joining the Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, where I'm a member now. And I understand after I left Long Island and left Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick and had my membership transferred that the church is like spiraled out of control and that you're down to like.

Five members after I left, is that true? We're down to two, we're still working.

Our way up to three since then. So you and Pastor Doug are it and even your spouses are no longer members. They're not even here anymore. No, I'm obviously just kidding. I think the most frequently repeated phrase at Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island is, Chris who?

But I do miss dearly many of the brethren there and please send my warm greetings to them. You know this tragedy, as these kinds of tragedies, these horrific nightmarish occurrences are happening more and more in our modern world than they ever did when I was growing up.

I mean I'm talking about the rapidly repeated occurrences of these kinds of events, that if we were to only discuss these kinds of events on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, that would be, you know, we would have no room to discuss anything else.

If every time an occurrence like this came up, we would just have everything else theologically and otherwise fall to the wayside, because these things happen with such frequency. But it is very providential that we had already scheduled you to be on today.

We did not schedule you because of the tragedy that occurred in Southern London Springs, Texas, but we had already scheduled you and it just so happens providentially that you wrote that book, Evil and Suffering in a Sovereign God's World, so it makes it more providentially appropriate to have you on today.

And I know that you have spoken about this the last time that we had you address the subject of this book, but perhaps you'll repeat it for our listeners who didn't hear the last interview. Can you tell us what led you to write this book in light of the fact that there have been other works that contain biblical truths on this very subject that have been available for centuries to the body of Christ?

Why did you find this particular volume a needed volume, and what was the void that needed to be filled in regard to this subject?

Why Write a Short Book on Evil and Suffering?

Well, I figured Chris, for starters. Including the God-inspired ones, I'm assuming. No, you know what inspired me to write this book, Chris, really was, and I think a lot of a lot of Christians at some point or other, especially go through these, you know, how could Adam and Eve, where does evil come from, does evil always exist alongside of God, or if it doesn't and God precedes everything, is he the author of evil?

So a lot of those kinds of questions, you know, come up naturally, you know, when we try to reason through things, especially in the Reformed faith, and in wrestling through those things from a biblical standpoint, I wanted to try to come out with something, a small volume, which this is, this is about a hundred pages, and it's also cut, and just something that people can use as a handy tool and kind of work through the chapters and get at least somewhat of a biblical explanation for condensing it, putting it more in a short form, and of course in modern language.

Well, it certainly is probably.

The number one issue that comes up when you are trying to present your faith, especially to unbelievers, or perhaps even to anyone, even a seasoned believer, when they themselves are personally experiencing the loss of a loved one or a tragedy or any kind of trial that seriously complicates their lives and perhaps plunges them into depression or confusion or doubt, but I mean obviously it's it's been known for centuries as the theodicy, the defense of God in the midst of evil and suffering, and these are things that can't be reconciled in the minds of everyone, and we have had in history, and even very recent history, well, I mean it's recent to you and I perhaps, but there are probably many Millennials who don't even know who Rabbi Kushner was, but Rabbi Kushner who wrote a classic book titled Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, and in that book Rabbi Kushner's answer or way of resolving the paradox of a good God being a God over an earth and over a people who are constantly facing all kinds of evil and suffering, his answer was that God is not all-powerful, that there are things beyond the control of God, which is obviously a very heretical and dangerous teaching that is foreign to the scriptures and obviously even foreign from the Hebrew scriptures, and I'm sure that there were multitudes of Orthodox Jews that even were in an uproar over Rabbi Kushner's book, but can't be the issue, and you have on the other end of the spectrum, you have those that are conservative Bible-believing Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy, who are opposed to the notion that God is in sovereign control over everything, and in fact that he decreed all things that come to pass, so they go to the other extreme to teach that basically for God to preserve a world that was nothing but peace and happiness and joy, he would have to rob men of an autonomous free will, which seems to be the the greatest gift in the minds of the non-reformed Christian, that for God to not have this type of free will embedded in the minds and hearts of every human being would make us robots in their opinion, and therefore we could not truly love God or one another because we would be just acting like pre-programmed automatons, but if you could give us the biblical truth, which obviously avoids those two heretical.

Extremes. Yeah, yeah, Chris, as you said, both of those, in trying to, and that's a real danger, is that, yeah, that God is completely all-sovereign over same time he is completely loving, he does not rejoice or be harmed, and yet at the same time he's completely sovereign and even uses the evil that exists.

God would even ordain that and use the very evil that we, so he's completely, and yet at the same time, he is good and righteous. Both are true. And I'm going to give our.

Listeners our email address if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

So that's chrisarnson at gmail .com. What can we learn from the comforters of Job? Obviously a classic example in the Bible, a primary example of a man who was known as a righteous man, not a sinless man, but one who was a God-fearing individual, and all these things, all these calamities came upon him.

There was attempts by Satan to break him, to prove God wrong, that if he was assaulted in all varying kinds of ways with increasing intensity, even leading to ultimately the death of children and so on.

The devil was trying to get him to lose his faith, to abandon it and curse God and so on. And we have comforters, friends of Job, coming to him, and before they start making mistakes and being more involved in wounding him or rubbing salt in the wound than they were comforting him, they did the right thing initially, didn't they?

Weren't they very silent initially when they approached him? Yeah, I believe when.

They first approached him they came with sackcloth faith. Now don't you.

Think that that is wise for us to remember, especially those Christians that are in love, and very appropriately so, with theology and doctrine and those who have a craving to always learn more and so on.

Sometimes we are the ones that are most guilty for trying to be a seminary professor in the midst of every occasion that providentially comes within our witness or within our life. When we are trying to reach out to someone with the the love of Christ or as an ambassador for Christ or simply as a brother or sister in Christ or as a friend, we may have a tendency to unload a truckload of theology on someone when that may be something very appropriate in time or over time, but can we be too quick with that kind of thing when we are attempting to comfort those who are experiencing great loss and great.

Tragedy and suffering? Yeah, and yeah, I think especially, you know, we were Calvinists, right, predestination, you know, the Word of God is comforting, but it has to be used wisely and carefully, and there are times, like you said, if somebody's mourning or grieving, there's a reminder of God, as opposed to just, you know, throwing out things like, you know, the well-received, and not every time there's immediately all the trying to jump on it and use it to an advantage, and people going back and forth and debating things, and it gets all people who lost loved ones, you know, and things like that, so I think there's got to be wisdom on how we approach things, the silent issue, like you said before, and to be able to understand how, you know, to understand how they feel and spend some time in the Psalms with them, maybe those kinds of things.

We don't want to just throw at people that, while they might be true, just are not the best word in season for someone who's been traumatized. For example, one of the guys at the Texas Church there, from what I read, had lost eight family members, his wife, some of his, I think his children, his wife, and his parents, all in one shot in that church.

You know, what do you say to a guy like that? Do you just walk up there and say, you know, start talking about the sovereignty of God in a way that's kind of like, get over it, or is there a place for really just listening in compassion and trying to really spend.

Time with him and to love him, you know? I can vividly remember, it's like etched in my mind, and I'm not going to identify the person by name, even though this person is actually now in eternity with Christ, this person has passed away, but this individual, who I love dearly, dear brother, but very lacking in tact when he found out that my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I was at a prayer meeting, obviously asking for not only the Lord to make it clear that my mother was saved, which the Lord certainly answered that prayer, I had the privilege of having Peter Jeffrey, of all people, who is now also spending eternity with Christ, Peter Jeffrey spent at least a half hour at my mother's deathbed, and this is during one of his rare visits to the United States, so it was very providential for me to have that privilege, and Peter Jeffrey arose from her room, because he was alone with her at my request, I wanted him to be alone with her, and he came out of that room and said with his thick Welsh accent, I don't know what you're worried about, she's going to heaven, she's born again, she's a Christian, but this individual approached me after prayer meeting, after hearing me praying for a healing for my mother, and he said, just remember Chris, it's a sin for you to want your mother to live, if it's God's will for her to die, and I said to him, how do I know it's his will for her to die, unless she's already passed away, I mean that's kind of an unusual thing to say, because you have no idea if it's God's will for a person to die, unless that person does die, obviously after that has happened, you know for certain that that was God's will, because he has decreed a day and an hour for all of us to depart from this earth, but that kind of a thing, where somebody has such a desire to immediately thrust some kind of a theological, what's the word, placard at you, and in that case it was just misinformed and unusual and a bad placard, we have to really put a leash on our tongues sometimes and just be there to hug people and cry with them and pray with them, don't we?

I mean we don't need to all be a seminary.

Professors during people's trials. No, in fact, generally speaking, during times like that, people aren't looking for, that certainly was the right thing, and then when God took the baby, he put back his clothes on and went and ate, you know.

And even we.

Have a classic scene from the scriptures that even many people who are not Christian have some familiarity with, and perhaps you could exegete this shortest passage in the Bible, I believe, Jesus wept.

I know that there are people that have varying ideas as to why Jesus wept that are separate from just the fact that he was mourning the death of somebody he loved, and I don't know what your opinions are.

Why do you think Jesus wept? Was that just one of a number of reasons he wept, or was it, as far as we know, just because his dear friend?

Yeah, I believe, Chris, that that text is profound. I believe from the dead he knew all that in advance. In fact, he prolonged his stay where he was before that so that Lazarus would die, and yet I believe that he wept because he saw the suffering of the people, and he felt compassion.

I think he wept because even knowing he had a perfect human heart, and he had compassion, and he wept. You know, I mean, I know there's all kinds of theological explanations people try to say, and he was grieved over their unbelief and all that.

That's just, I don't see any of that in the text. He just, he was, even though he was the Lord of Glory, and Lazarus, he was in touch with the emotions of those people, and he felt it, and he wept with them.

That would be the normal way to understand that from what is written. To presume he was weeping over a lack of faith is just that. It's presumption, isn't it? I mean, there's nothing in the text that would make us or lead us to the conclusion that that is why he was weeping, other than the normal reason why people weep when someone dies.

It's because of compassion over not only the fact that a loved one has died, but also the fact that there are people around that loved one, family members and friends, who are in mourning, and they're weeping.

Yeah, yeah, there's no.

Question in that setting, and even in the setting where Jesus weeps, Wales, in fact, over Jerusalem, come upon her, reached out and, you know, over-Calvinized, tried to write, you know, try from the reality of the fact, fully human in the most sanctified sense, and had a heart and a compassion, even for those who were coming under his judgment, even though he was sovereign, even though he knew all things.

To be able to say, and not just take our logic and connect every dot, and say, well, it wouldn't have been this, because we need to learn from this, or not trusting... And we're going to be going to our first break.

Right now, and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to forward you an email with a question from our listener in Slovenia, Joe, because it's rather lengthy, and I'd like you to have it in front of you, so you have time to look it over during the station break, but in fact, I will read it now, and I will also forward it to you, so you have it in front of you, and as I said, it's rather lengthy, so this way you won't miss anything that he has to say.

Joe in Slovenia says, Dear Brother Chris, thank you for being so sensitive and caring to offer your show as a forum for the healing process needed by so many, and seemingly ever more frequently. Asking theological questions in relation to topics like this is always dangerous from the standpoint of risking being perceived as insensitive and uncaring.

Please don't misunderstand me, but do we in large part struggle with the injustice and outright evil of these types of tragedies, at least partially, because we lose sight of the ultimate injustice and quintessential expression of evil in the crucifixion of Christ, especially when we remember he willingly gave himself to be brutally murdered by us in our place?

Do we inappropriately fixate on the injustice and evil of these types of horrific atrocities because we have lost sight of and confidence in the eternal and absolute justice and righteousness that awaits us all in Christ's return?

Accepting those pardoned in Christ, no one gets away with anything. Thank you for your worldwide pastoral ministry on this and similar topics. Well thank you Joe in Slovenia, and we're gonna have Mark Ramaldi answer that when we return from our station break.

If you'd like to join Joe in Slovenia with a question of your own, if you want to get in line, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, God willing we're gonna be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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Well, for some reason our ad froze midway right in the middle of the commercial, so I'm not really sure why that happened. Hopefully that won't continue happening, but we are back with our discussion with Pastor Mark Romaldi of Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island, which is located in Merrick, New York, and we are discussing the theme of a book that he has written.

He has written a number of books, but this particular theme is something that is obviously very providential in the midst of what has just recently occurred in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the massacre that occurred there at the First Baptist Church where nearly thirty men, women, and children were murdered by a sadistic, evil individual, and the book that we are discussing is Evil and Suffering in a Sovereign God's World.

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The Cross as the Greatest Evil and the Greatest Good

And that too occurred according to the decree of God for reasons that we may never know, even in heaven we may never know that, and probably in heaven I'm quite certain actually that we won't care, and I don't think that I will probably care by the end of the day, although it's frustrating right now.

We have Joe in Slovenia, he asked you a very lengthy question and I'll read it to you again, and you had it in front of you I'm assuming as well, but he said Dear Brother Chris, thank you for being so sensitive and caring to offer your show as a forum for the healing process needed by so many and seemingly ever more frequently.

Asking theological questions in relation to topics like this is always dangerous from the standpoint of risking being perceived as insensitive and uncaring. Please don't misunderstand me, but do we in large part struggle with the injustice and outright evil of these types of tragedies at least partially because we lose sight of the ultimate injustice and quintessential expression of evil in the crucifixion of Christ, especially when we remember he willingly gave himself to be brutally murdered by us in our place.

Do we inappropriately fixate on the injustice and evil of these types of horrific atrocities because we have lost sight of and confidence in the eternal and absolute justice and righteousness that awaits us all in Christ's return?

Accepting those pardoned in Christ, no one gets away with anything. I'm actually, maybe I'm just revealing my own stupidity, but I'm really, I'm actually having a hard time understanding the thrust of Joe's question other than the fact that it's obvious that people do view asking theological questions at certain points as being insensitive and uncaring, which is something that we already were addressing perhaps in part at least in what we were saying at the outset of the broadcast.

But is he, and perhaps he could send a clarifying email, but he's saying that are we paying too much attention to horrible atrocities knowing that was a far greater atrocity, that Christ was crucified?

I don't know if that's what he means, but obviously we're not supposed to lack compassion, and we're not supposed to ignore things like this just because of the fact that the greatest act of injustice that ever took place in history was the murder of Christ.

But at the same time, I don't know, what do you get from this question?

Yeah, I'm not 100 sure either, Chris, but what I would say is that I think part of what he said about the we here is speaking about Christians, based upon where he goes in the whole context of this, when we begin to say it on the evil of what has taken place to the point that almost we would question God in any sense because of what has happened, do we forget ultimately justice will deal with those things.

But what I would say is this anyway, I do have, in the book I have a section toward the later part of it, the issue of the cross, you know, and it's called, the chapter's called, because I think that's important, you have to come back to the cross when you deal with the issue of God's sovereignty and the reality of evil in the world because it's at the cross, right, and in one vein we see the greatest event of evil in that a man who is completely righteous and just, the God being mocked, beaten, crucified, and ultimately put to death for no sins of his, and yet at the same time God accomplishes the greatest good through that evil.

He uses it and he's just in what he does, Lord, because Jesus is standing right on our behalf, he's dealing with our sins, so God uses even the evil of man, of those who have put him to death, even the evil of the devil who had a time there, in some way as the Lord says, you know, that it was, during that time he would, the opposition of evil would come against him, that God used even all of that with those evil intentions on the parts of creatures that he used for the greatest good, for the greatest righteous cause, and in the end it would all bring glory to God, right, because along those lines, but all of these kinds of things that I know, evil in the world, he'd be beaten by someone and murdered and things like that that would get us really just horrified by the extent of evil, one of the points I make with that is that it is important to be reminded that a judgment for these things is we have to be reminded of the fact that what we see in time and space is not the end-all, right, and for those who commit these kinds of atrocities, unless they repent, right, and come to Christ, which certainly in the case of the guy with, not the end, from based on what we see on this side of the grave.

Again, I'm not sure 100 if that's where he was going, but I think there's some of those elements in there.

God's Sovereignty, Human Responsibility, and the Hardening of Hearts

Yeah, and I don't know whether it was his intention or not, but I could apply his question to an in-house argument that we who are Reformed have with our Arminian and non-Calvinist brethren. In fact, even Arminian brethren are in, they're not all in lockstep harmony over this because there are those who would be not Reformed who seem to have an understanding of God's sovereignty over all earthly events or all events in heaven and on earth.

They would not view God, not all of them that is, as some kind of just a cosmic spectator who is just sitting there on his throne watching things happen. But there are those, I can still vividly remember Joel Osteen's father, John Osteen, who was a very different kind of a preacher than his son Joel, both heretical, but the approach that John Osteen had was he was more openly critical theologically of people who he disagreed with, whereas Joel Osteen doesn't seem to want to criticize anybody for their theology.

But John, his dad, I can remember him bashing Calvinism during a sermon, and he said, can you believe that there are people who believe that if your little itty-bitty baby wanders out into the street and your little itty-bitty baby gets hit by a car and killed, that God had something to do with that.

God had nothing to do with that. That was the devil that did that. And I can remember sitting there thinking, so the devil was more powerful than God at that moment, or was God sleeping, or what do you mean he had nothing to do with it?

It's just that when Christians, I can understand when a non-believer or perhaps a new believer might react that way, but a person who's a trained pastor who, you know, I mean, from what I remember, he, and of course a lot of people like him, even if they have horrible theology, they know what the Bible says.

They don't necessarily exegete it correctly, but some of them have great memory skills about, you know, biblical texts and so on, and yet this man is trying to remove God from the equation of something like a baby being killed, or I'm sure he would have said something very similar if he was alive in regard to the massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Now, removing God completely from this situation, people are compelled at times to somehow find comfort in that, but is that really a source of comfort to think that God had.

Nothing at all to do with what occurred? There's no comfort in that at all, Chris. It's far worse if that were the case. If you think about it, that the itty-bitty baby by the car, and the devil had kind of gotten away with that, first of all, there's in some way a relinquishing of power on the part of God, or yin-yang kind of thing, where there's an equality there with God and the devil.

But what happens with that is, basically, it makes the whole, we look at, and more importantly, the doctrines of Scripture, is to say that even in that death of that baby, in some way, we might not have all the answers, we're not God, we don't understand everything, but in some way, at the end of the day, God is going to be glorified in that, and some great good will come out of that.

And oftentimes, it's through the most horrific events that God accomplished some of the greatest good. For example, the cross, right? You look at the cross from the standpoint of an observer who doesn't understand what's going on there, which many of his disciples would not have before, right before he had risen from the dead.

It looks like, you know, like, okay, well, the devil won, you know, the devil got away with it. But when we realize on the other side of that cross that not an ounce of God's glory is tarnished, that at the end of the day, there's not like some springs of history that have kind of gotten out of God's hands that are on the side somewhere.

We look at the Doctrine of Scripture, and we see that every single, every single spring of history is going to spill into the ocean of bringing glory to God. Everything. There's not a drop that's going to be left out somewhere, whether it's an itty-bitty baby, which is far more significant than a drop, but, or whatever it is, dying in some way, or what happened to the church in Texas, all of these things, God is going to use all those things for great good, to bring great glory to His name, and in a very righteous and just way, even those who are meant to be evil, though they'll be judged, He will turn it around and use it for some greater good.

So we don't, we don't, we don't see that all in time and space. We don't know exactly how that's happening, but we look at Scripture, and we can observe it in the past. We see what happened with Joseph when he was sold into slavery.

We see what happened with Christ at the cross. We see what happened with the life of David and all the tragedies that he faced and how God turned things around. So we're, it's hard to look when you're living through it in the present and be able to say, okay, this is why, and this is why, and this is why, and we're really not supposed to do that anyway.

But it is, we are able to look at what the Scriptures teach and say, in the big plan of God's scheme of redemption, church in Texas, even the child, God forbid, who gets raped, we hear about those stories.

All of those things, in the end, there will be a just, a just, dealing with those, with those who have committed wrong, and at the same time, in some way, all those things will ultimately bring praise to God and glory to God, and we will rejoice in that, in what he has done.

Do you think that the opposition to God's sovereignty over all things comes from perhaps a very right instinct to defend the character of God, to defend the love and mercy and kindness and goodness of God, but the people that are opposing God's sovereignty over all things are just reacting in an unbiblical way.

They are militating against truths that are in Scripture in order to reach the end they are attempting to reach in defense of God, and you have, you know, really, people coming to all kinds of heretical understandings.

They always wind up really making God more impotent, unconsciously, of course, but they make him really a lot more impotent. Of course, he is not impotent in any way, but they reduce his omnipotence, and they reduce his omnipresence, they reduce all of the attributes that reflect his power and authority and.

Control and sovereignty to some degree, don't they? Yeah, like you said, Chris, it's not a malicious thing, I would say, by and large. I would think that most, if not all, sincere Christians, Arminians, in their mind, they're trying to defend what they believe to be the integrity of God, because they cannot, the justice of God and the goodness of God with his sovereignty, in light of those kinds of events, they can't see it.

So they're trying to make a defense of God in some sense, but the problem with that is, as you said, what they're doing in the process, they're cutting him back, and really, a lot of problems. It even ultimately leads to very man-centered theology, you know, God is kind of here for us, we have to kind of let him in, and, you know, we have to allow him to do certain things, and the Lord is just weeping over the world in a sense that he just wishes he could do something, but he can't.

When you let that play out, and just of the glory, you said, yeah, God is compassionate, he's loving beyond what we can comprehend, but we don't want to throw away his omnipotence and his sovereignty to try to rectify what makes sense.

So yeah, I think they mean well, but the damage is still done. It's a man-centered focus in ministry and so on, you know, it's all about, you know, the dust on the scales, as it says in Isaiah, you know, we're like that all the nations are a drop in the bucket, and we're like grasshoppers, and God looks down upon the circle of the earth.