Why Does God Allow Bad Things?
Posted: Sunday, November 30, 2008
by Abigail Richards
Why do bad things happen? Why does God allow evil, sickness, hurt or any other form of pain?
As news broke of the massacres in India, my heart was saddened. As an American I couldn't help but cry over the misery the people of India were suffering. Anger rose up as I remembered the hurt and pain that we experienced after September 11.
It is easy when we watch the news or hear of the economy or even face our own sickness to question God's will. There are times in my life when this would cause me to doubt my own Christianity. Am I not serving enough, praying enough, reading my bible enough, etc.?
There is a story in John 11 in which Lazarus has died. As Jesus walks to the tomb he sees Lazarus's sisters Mary and Martha crying. The Bible says Jesus wept when he saw their sadness.
Why did he weep? Because he loved them and seeing them in pain made him weep. Just because bad things are happening does not mean that Jesus is absent or unaware. In fact, most times he is right there weeping with us.
I can look back over my short life and see this application in my life. Here are just a few instances and the reasons God allowed them to happen.
Infidelity in my marriage-At the time, it was the most horrible thing to live through. Now God's glory is evident because my marriage is stronger than it ever was between my husband and me. We learned to base our marriage on God instead of our own selfish wants. I also realized the only person that should be put on a pedestal is Jesus, not any human. Humans make mistakes and we should only worship the one and only I Am, God.
Loss of a parent. Living through the death of my mom was a hard, horrific time. The truth is that a lot of good came out of the end of that relationship. I quit holding on to the past and looking for her to bale me out. Instead I learned to turn to Jesus who can meet every want and need so much better.
Financial struggles. My husband lost his job when I had a preemie at home weeks before Christmas. I remember questioning God a lot during that time period. God was removing him from a bad situation and moving him into a better situation. A job that ultimately would bring him closer to God. Every need and want was met during that period of time.
Sexually abused as a child. I still do not know what glory God gets from this period in my life. I might never know. But I trust the truth that He has a reason for everything. I look back on that time in my life and I can see God right there weeping with me.
The end of the story in John 11 is that Jesus ultimately answers the family's prayer and raises Lazarus from the dead. There are several instances in the Bible when God is questioned. There is nothing wrong with questioning God, just be prepared that God answers prayers on his own terms.
The above story in which my husband was fired is one of those instances. I had just finished praying and asking God to make my husband find happiness and a new place where he could do that. He called as soon as I said Amen to say he had been fired. God is always working for our good.
Habakkuk was on of those people. Look in Habakkuk Chapter 1:
2 How long, O LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, "Violence!" but you do not save?
3 Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.
4 Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.
What follows is God's answer. I encourage you to check out verse 5.
He says that He is taking care of the evil so that others may see things so they will believe. Jesus raised Lazarus so that the Jews and others could see that He was the savior foretold years before.
God loves despite the bad. God works during the bad and at times he weeps with us, but He is always active and present.
This season of my life I am grateful that He was always by my side. I find comfort in knowing that God is always in control. I love knowing that everything happens for a reason far greater than I will ever know. God is Love. God is our savior. God is our comforter. God is in control!
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Hi Abigail,
This article can be very beneficial to anyone, whether entering a challenge, going through one or coming out of one. We can apply the scriptures you used to comfort and helps us endure whatever is going on in our lives. Jesus weeps over us. I believe that with all my heart.
As difficult as things are/appear, I try to not figure them out but trust Jesus with everything. I have implicit trust in Him knowing He weeps when bad things happen, too. It has taken staying in His Word and living a few years past the last major crisis in my life to come to this place where I have peace and just trust Him. Some will think I'm strange but I will break out in spontaneous praise [when bad things happen] because I know He will use everything that happens to His children (as you've said) for His glory!
This was a beautifully written message of faith. Thank you.
Warm regards,
AvisAvis-What an awesome picture! breaking out in praise when bad things happen. I am sure you have gotten some looks in your time :) Thanks so much for sharing your story-I was encouraged today! Remembering to trust God is hard at times, but makes life so much easier! thanks for commenting!
Abigail, I found myself writing to this a number of times myself. And I often shout out the back window or in my yard, or my wife hears me mumbling to God, ok when is enough going to be enough. Yet when I fall back on His Word I find out much of what I suffer is my own doing. Not all, but much. Also, very definitively God states believers are marked with the sign of suffering. He did not say professors, believers. Trials will always be with those who truly believ in Him. It is how they are known. They suffer as he suffered. It really is a grace, a blessing. "Pick up your cross". If we keep focused on Him and not the world then everything in and of the world is valueless except that He created for us, our loved ones. Buying our way out, praying our way out, possible, but only when God's will is done. Meaning if and when he wants to. Peace and blessings. "Harden not your heart". RobertGreat advice Robert and so true! Thank you for sharing and commenting!
Abigail,An often posed question, but so often misunderstood in its answering. Actually, knowing specifically why He allows certain bad incidents to occur can only be known by Him. However, His general purpose is twofold: punishment and education. Here's an excerpt from my review on Victor E Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning, where amongst some of the most abject horrors known to man, in the concentration camps of WWII, eternal lessons of light and knowledge are obtained:Frankl in thinking on his wife, sees love for the far greater thing that it is than one may ever see in settled, comfortable times. It is within this abject horror that Frankl is blessed with a vision of the significance of man and his purpose for being, for he states, "The truth--love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire." Later he states, "Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive acting, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'"At another point, the author encountered a woman mesmerized by a tree outside her window. When asked what she was doing, she told the author that she was listening to the tree speak. When asked what it was saying she responded, "I'm discovering that growing up I was spoiled that here I am learning the true meaning and importance of life. I am grateful."In times of war we learn of our utter dependence on God and how insignificant and useless we are without him, for who does not pray to Him regardless of religion or one of no religion in times of need? We also learn how insignificant our general biases and misunderstandings are. And it is the earthquake, the flood, the fires, the life-threatening disease, the catastrophe that wakes us to His calling and our utter, dire dependence on Him for all that we need.
And what of the Savior's suffering on the cross? He suffered so that He could do what he was called to do, to descend below all things so that all humankind could have the joys of eternal life. Even He who could have called down hosts of angels to His rescue did not for the fulfilling of His mission and as an example of the pain we would all certainly encounter. For what great gift of eternal import comes to those without a show of faith and effort in the giver of that gift.
But God cares little for Glory if it doesn't lead to the education of his children and our better understanding of purpose and our need to come to Him now in prayer so that we may come to Him later in person, for He desires nothing but the best gift of all through His only begotten son, even Jesus Christ who died for our sins, and to protect us here on this earth, this training ground, this experimental laboratory called life.
How would we see the true, deep, profound, eternal importance of TRUTH if we do not suffer in juxtaposition to it. How can we in our luxury and ease learn of the dire importance of needing to be humble, kind, caring, focused on the Charity of Christ, the true nature of giving, if we are not taken out of our comfort. Contrary to popular notion, we were not put here to indulge in our wants, needs, and fantasies, but to learn of those things eternal that come at a cost. No one learn without at least a little blood, sweat, and tears. For where does our learning of important eternal truths come if not from difficult times. We can venture to Disneyland as oft as we desire but we will never learn the importance of TRUTH that is so essential to our betterment, our growth, and our coming back to Him in our glory to glorify Him in the knowledge we have found.
God bless you for your article and your searching desire to take the risk to learn, come out of your comfort zone and to learn of the better way, the path back to Him.Jeff, I think you profoundly misunderstood Frankl. Citing him in support of some notion of the Christian god is absurd. Frankl's psychology was existentialist. The book we know now as Man's Search for Meaning was originally titled (in German) "...saying yes to life in spite of everything; A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp". "In spite of everything" is worth noting. The book's original English title was From Death-camp to Existentialism. This was not a theological existentialism like that of Kierkegaard.
Frankl's existentialism was born of the Holocaust as proof of the non-existence of external meaning—and, by implication, the non-existence of any god of the sort promoted by Judaism and Christianity. One would hardly need to search for meaning in ephemera such as images or the love of one's wife or child, or in the dignity of Man under the greatest barbarisms, if "God" were an available, legitimate source of meaning.
Frankl's philosophy doesn't necessarily reject the validity of individuals finding meaning in notions of "God," and he was an educated scientist deeply familiar with religious literature and tradition, so his writing naturally reflects the wonderful poetry of the Judeo-Christian myths. The proposition that Frankl embraced, or that his writing supports, the concept of a somehow-benevolent god worth worshipping, however, is ridiculous.
I think Frankl's position would be much closer to that of fellow Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who said "There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God." I think Frankl, like Levi, would utterly reject theodicy.I think St. Thomas Aquinas said it better:
St. Thomas Aquinas
Saint Thomas systematized St. Augustine principles supplementing them. Evil, according to St. Thomas, is a privation, or the absence of some good which belongs properly to the nature of the creature. There is therefore no positive source of evil, corresponding to the greater good, which is God; evil being not real but rational—i.e. it exists not as an objective fact, but as a subjective conception; things are evil not in themselves, but by reason of their relation to other things, or persons. All realities are in themselves good; they produce bad results only incidentally; and consequently the ultimate cause of evil is fundamentally good, as well as the objects in which evil is found.
"Evil is threefold, viz., metaphysical evil, moral, and physical, the retributive consequence of moral guilt. Its existence subserves the perfection of the whole; the universe would be less perfect if it contained no evil. Thus fire could not exist without the corruption of what it consumes; the lion must slay the ass in order to live, and if there were no wrong doing, there would be no sphere for patience and justice. God is said (as in Isaiah 45) to be the author of evil in the sense that the corruption of material objects in nature is ordained by Him, as a means for carrying out the design of the universe; and on the other hand, the evil which exists as a consequence of the breach of Divine laws is in the same sense due to Divine appointment; the universe would be less perfect if its laws could be broken with impunity. Thus evil, in one aspect, i.e. as counter-balancing the deordination of sin, has the nature of good. But the evil of sin, though permitted by God, is in no sense due to him; its cause is the abuse of free will by angels and men. It should be observed that the universal perfection to which evil in some form is necessary, is the perfection of this universe, not of any universe: metaphysical evil, that is to say, and indirectly, moral evil as well, is included in the design of the universe which is partially known to us; but we cannot say without denying the Divine omnipotence, that another equally perfect universe could not be created in which evil would have no place.
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