Postmodern Nonsense Meets Palpable Evil
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.400 | Each day we are awakened to the harsh reality of violence in this world.
00:00:09.680 | On the news we see the consequences of palpable evil in this world that is undeniable.
00:00:14.400 | The global bloodshed is horrific and often hard to bear.
00:00:18.400 | It causes us to rise up in seeking justice and this proves that objective evil exists.
00:00:24.400 | It's real.
00:00:25.700 | As John Piper showed in his recent sermon.
00:00:28.300 | Here's what he said.
00:00:31.000 | I want to ask why do we have a world like this?
00:00:34.700 | Why so much pain?
00:00:36.000 | Why so much conflict?
00:00:38.100 | Why so much suffering?
00:00:39.300 | Why so much death?
00:00:41.200 | It is a horrible place.
00:00:43.300 | It is a conveyor belt of corpses.
00:00:47.000 | Millions of people right now are weeping their eyes out over the sorrows in their lives as we speak.
00:00:55.300 | Now before I go to the Bible and try to give you pointers for you to think about.
00:01:01.500 | Let me tell you something that I think I found very shocking when I realized it.
00:01:09.500 | God has ordained in his mercy that sometimes very unbelieving people wake up to his reality
00:01:22.100 | because of pain, not because of its absence.
00:01:27.200 | For example, suppose you're a professor in a university
00:01:31.900 | and you've absorbed a postmodern mindset that playfully says,
00:01:40.980 | what's right for you is right for you.
00:01:42.940 | And what's right for me is right for me.
00:01:45.620 | And what's wrong for you is wrong for you.
00:01:48.140 | And what's wrong for me is wrong for me.
00:01:51.200 | And we don't impose our morality on each other.
00:01:56.700 | There is no one absolute right and wrong, good and bad,
00:02:01.900 | beautiful and ugly, that gets squashed down
00:02:04.460 | onto our own perceptions and preferences.
00:02:07.860 | That's just rampant, right?
00:02:09.380 | That's just rampant.
00:02:10.860 | And it is playful.
00:02:12.540 | And it is going to come to an end
00:02:14.940 | when that professor walks into a real living Holocaust himself.
00:02:24.040 | So whatever the situation is, he walks
00:02:28.400 | into an experience of 6 million Jewish people murdered,
00:02:36.360 | or 60 million under the Stalinist regime,
00:02:40.960 | starved and killed in the gulags.
00:02:44.880 | Or we're celebrating 100 years this year
00:02:47.720 | since the Armenian genocide of the Turkish people,
00:02:52.760 | slaughtering a million and a half
00:02:55.520 | Armenians between Turkey and Syria in 1915.
00:03:00.800 | You walk into that as a professor who's
00:03:05.240 | been playing word games on tenure with students,
00:03:11.240 | fitting them to be destroyed by the world in which they live
00:03:15.600 | with this absolute nonsense.
00:03:18.720 | That what's right for you is right for you.
00:03:20.520 | What's wrong for me is wrong for me.
00:03:22.080 | And suddenly, he is so confronted by an evil,
00:03:25.520 | he finds welling up out of his heart a statement
00:03:28.640 | he thought would never come.
00:03:30.000 | That is evil.
00:03:33.360 | And suddenly, he realizes what he just said.
00:03:37.760 | He does not mean, well, if you don't think it's evil,
00:03:41.400 | you don't have to think it's evil.
00:03:42.800 | You can think it's good.
00:03:45.360 | He has just woken up from a dream world, an academic dream
00:03:49.200 | world.
00:03:51.160 | And he knows he has made a pronouncement
00:03:54.700 | of absolute significance.
00:03:57.760 | That's evil.
00:03:59.800 | That's evil.
00:04:01.120 | And he knows, he's a professor.
00:04:03.520 | He knows and he realizes, I have just broken every rule
00:04:08.640 | in my philosophy.
00:04:11.880 | And I cannot deny what I am saying.
00:04:15.640 | That's evil.
00:04:17.040 | And I don't mean it's the result of chemical synapses popping
00:04:21.680 | in my evolutionary primate brain.
00:04:26.840 | I mean, it's real.
00:04:27.920 | I mean, it has significance.
00:04:29.360 | I mean, it is a moral reality.
00:04:31.720 | It holds for everybody.
00:04:33.400 | This is not part of what I was thinking.
00:04:36.160 | This is evil.
00:04:37.880 | And he knows pronouncements like that
00:04:41.560 | are meaningless unless there's an absolute.
00:04:47.760 | And where do they come from?
00:04:50.560 | They come from God or nowhere.
00:04:53.480 | You live a life of meaninglessness.
00:04:56.360 | You're a bag of chemicals and electrical impulses
00:05:00.920 | just moving in a kind of evolutionary movement of time
00:05:05.320 | and chance with no significance to your moral judgments
00:05:08.880 | whatsoever unless God is.
00:05:13.840 | It happens.
00:05:14.520 | In other words, it happens that in the myth of evil,
00:05:17.480 | evil becomes the very moment and means by which a person can
00:05:24.000 | awaken to the fact that we're not playing games.
00:05:28.720 | We're not just stuff.
00:05:32.520 | It is a wonderful thing that God has mercy
00:05:36.600 | like that in the midst of such great evils.
00:05:43.240 | Yes, that is sobering and glorious at the same time.
00:05:46.600 | This clip was taken from John Piper's recent sermon,
00:05:49.160 | The Pain of the World and the Purposes of God,
00:05:52.360 | a sermon he preached in Vancouver on April 26.
00:05:55.920 | You can find the full audio recording of the sermon
00:05:58.360 | at DesiringGod.org right now.
00:06:00.440 | Video is also online as well.
00:06:02.880 | And tomorrow, we're going to return with guest Paul Tripp.
00:06:05.920 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:06:07.120 | We'll see you then.
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