Tough one.
When you think of babies born without arms or legs. You witness hardened criminals allowed to go scot-free, over and over again. A war perpetrated against a country who has not committed crimes that would warrant that action. People drawn in to drug addiction they can’t break. When you hear in the news that so many helpless young girls have been sold into sex slavery. Watch as a heartless powerful dictator is living high, while his countrymen are suffering in starvation and poverty. When you read of, or personally are acquainted with, a person who feels that they are trapped in the body of the wrong sex.
Throughout time, some have held the belief that God the Creator has made mistakes in allowing things like this to happen.
Well, first of all, if God, the creator of everything has made a mistake, I sure wouldn’t want to be the one created being that has the guts to stand up and tell The All-Powerful One that He did! I may not be the most intelligent, but I do have more brains than that.
Secondly, yes, definitely we are surrounded by heartbreaking circumstances everywhere we look. Absolutely no doubt of that. But, is that reality a result of God’s inattention, His vengefulness, His uncaring? Or rather, is it a result of sin – the behavior that God Himself has warned men and women against throughout all generations of time?
The Bible is filled with cautions and pleadings from Him, telling people what the inevitable result of sin will be. Pain and heartache. And remember, the consequences of bad behavior are not visited just on the person who acted against God’s advice. We are all interconnected, and therefore what I do affects you and yours. Little children suffer badly from the decisions made in the generations before them. Innocent people are terribly hurt when someone decides they can do anything they so please – regardless of God’s warnings against sinning.
I have heard the statements, “Well, good grief, He is God! He could stop all this pain and suffering with a blink of His eye if He wanted to. So why doesn’t He, if He is a loving God?
Yep, He certainly could.
Except for one thing. Our loving God doesn’t believe in forcing anyone to act right. That would make us no more than human puppets, and He doesn’t seem to want that for us. He evidently has placed limits on His power to make us do what is good and right, versus living in sin. But why would He do that? Couple of reasons. He wants us to obey Him, not out of fear and oppression, but from love. And also, because He deliberately didn’t create us as robots, unable to think, reason, and have affection.
When you look honestly at the facts, we humans are the reason there is so much pain in this world, not God.
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