Surely you have heard someone express the question: “How could a good God allow all the bad things to happen in the world?” At some point in life many of us have asked ourselves that question. We see God’s goodness manifested in us in many different ways in life, and yet He allows horrible things to happen in this world. For example, how could God allow women and children to die in Gaza City at this time, while Israeli troops are trying to stop the missiles that Hamas militants are firing at Israel from Gaza City and the surrounding area?
As non-combatants, they are innocent victims. For the Israeli army they are collateral damage that has nothing to do with the Hamas party’s aggression towards Israel. How could a good God allow this to happen? How could a good God stand by and allow all the horrible destruction that has taken place in this old world, since time immemorial? By the grace of God, I am going to present some biblical answers to this age old question.
People who choose not to acknowledge the existence of a good God have very different opinions about why bad things happen to harmless people in the world. For some of them, perhaps the non-combatants dying in Gaza were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims of fate and political disagreement. The spiritually blind regard those who are the perpetrators of newsworthy crimes and destruction as the only “bad” people in the world: those who fall short of the Glory of God that they themselves refuse to acknowledge. For those who do not know the Lord, bloody wars and ethnic conflicts are simply the result of unfortunate political misunderstandings.
The wisdom and spiritual discernment that God gives us as gifts of His Spirit can enable us to understand the true reasons and powers behind many of life’s dark realities, as well as the good and beautiful ones. Daniel 12:10 Many will be purified, and made white, and purified; but the wicked will act wickedly, and none of the wicked will understand; but the wise will understand. Those who do not know Him have not availed themselves of this benefit. Isaiah 8:20 “To the law and to the testimony! If they do not say according to this, it is because it has not dawned on them.
The sovereignty of God, and why He cannot intervene in situations that have to do with the acts of the will of men, is a truth that can be understood if we understand the Scriptures. The word “sovereignty” is defined in the Free Online Dictionary as follows: “Supremacy of authority or rule exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state.”
God is sovereign over all of his creation, but by divine decree he refuses to control our will within it. Everything that God does and has done is a sovereign act, because He is a sovereign God. God created man with the will to choose between good and evil, and gave us dominion over the Earth. When our First Parents fell from His grace by disobeying Him, their spiritual natures changed from being illuminated with the love and life of God to the spiritual darkness of the world: that emptiness became a reality that was passed down to all succeeding generations.
God will not violate his divine ordinance of having granted man the power of free will: he cannot force us to love him. Nor will he deny us our ability to break his Law of Love. If we break that Law of Love, we are guilty of the same disobedience that Adam and Eve were guilty of before God. His Heart’s Desire, his greatest Purpose for us, is that we love, adore and serve him because we choose him. God wants a People faithful and obedient to Him, out of love. We can be transformed into everything the Lord wants us to be, if we accept it, and Christ by his Spirit lives in us. Genesis 1:26-28:
27 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the beasts, over all the earth, and over every animal that creeps on the earth. . 27 And God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over all beasts. that moves on the earth.
The Lord in His sovereignty created the earth and created man on it. As a sovereign act, he gave man dominion over the whole earth and everything on it. When man was given dominion over the earth, the earth became man’s responsibility. That stewardship has been passed down to all succeeding generations.
It is difficult for us to understand how God can be so good, and we, His creation, can be so different from Him in our Adamic spiritual nature. God by his Spirit must reveal to each of us the reality of the spiritual impotence that we have all inherited, and how without his Spirit living in us we are all captive to the law of sin. Bad things happen in a world that a good God created because he is not doing his universal loving will, in a world populated by fallen and loveless beings. Only those who have accepted him, and have been transformed and given life by his Spirit have God’s kind of love living in us: self-sacrificing love, which no law can be against. Love is the fulfillment of the law. Romans 10:4 “For the end of the law is Christ, for righteousness to everyone who believes in him.”
God’s heart must break for Him to observe the pain and anguish that lives in His world, the suffering caused by the lack of His love in the hearts of men and women. However, His original creation of man was good, and man was created with the capacity to be completely loving and obedient to Him. The evil in the world is not the result of a sadistic God who made a world where evil was the ruler. Man’s rejection of God’s Love and His Ways is, and always has been, the cause of pain and suffering in the world.
John Simmons © January 11, 2009