Each day we are awakened to the harsh reality of violence in this world. On the news we see the consequences of palpable evil in this world that is undeniable. The global bloodshed is horrific and often hard to bear. It causes us to rise up in seeking justice and this proves that objective evil exists.

It's real. As John Piper showed in his recent sermon. Here's what he said. I want to ask why do we have a world like this? Why so much pain? Why so much conflict? Why so much suffering? Why so much death? It is a horrible place. It is a conveyor belt of corpses.

Millions of people right now are weeping their eyes out over the sorrows in their lives as we speak. Now before I go to the Bible and try to give you pointers for you to think about. Let me tell you something that I think I found very shocking when I realized it.

God has ordained in his mercy that sometimes very unbelieving people wake up to his reality because of pain, not because of its absence. For example, suppose you're a professor in a university and you've absorbed a postmodern mindset that playfully says, what's right for you is right for you. And what's right for me is right for me.

And what's wrong for you is wrong for you. And what's wrong for me is wrong for me. And we don't impose our morality on each other. There is no one absolute right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, that gets squashed down onto our own perceptions and preferences.

That's just rampant, right? That's just rampant. And it is playful. And it is going to come to an end when that professor walks into a real living Holocaust himself. So whatever the situation is, he walks into an experience of 6 million Jewish people murdered, or 60 million under the Stalinist regime, starved and killed in the gulags.

Or we're celebrating 100 years this year since the Armenian genocide of the Turkish people, slaughtering a million and a half Armenians between Turkey and Syria in 1915. You walk into that as a professor who's been playing word games on tenure with students, fitting them to be destroyed by the world in which they live with this absolute nonsense.

That what's right for you is right for you. What's wrong for me is wrong for me. And suddenly, he is so confronted by an evil, he finds welling up out of his heart a statement he thought would never come. That is evil. And suddenly, he realizes what he just said.

He does not mean, well, if you don't think it's evil, you don't have to think it's evil. You can think it's good. He has just woken up from a dream world, an academic dream world. And he knows he has made a pronouncement of absolute significance. That's evil. That's evil.

And he knows, he's a professor. He knows and he realizes, I have just broken every rule in my philosophy. And I cannot deny what I am saying. That's evil. And I don't mean it's the result of chemical synapses popping in my evolutionary primate brain. I mean, it's real. I mean, it has significance.

I mean, it is a moral reality. It holds for everybody. This is not part of what I was thinking. This is evil. And he knows pronouncements like that are meaningless unless there's an absolute. And where do they come from? They come from God or nowhere. You live a life of meaninglessness.

You're a bag of chemicals and electrical impulses just moving in a kind of evolutionary movement of time and chance with no significance to your moral judgments whatsoever unless God is. It happens. In other words, it happens that in the myth of evil, evil becomes the very moment and means by which a person can awaken to the fact that we're not playing games.

We're not just stuff. It is a wonderful thing that God has mercy like that in the midst of such great evils. Yes, that is sobering and glorious at the same time. This clip was taken from John Piper's recent sermon, The Pain of the World and the Purposes of God, a sermon he preached in Vancouver on April 26.

You can find the full audio recording of the sermon at DesiringGod.org right now. Video is also online as well. And tomorrow, we're going to return with guest Paul Tripp. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.