Why does God allow bad things to happen to innocent people?
Precursor: Part One Introduction 1
About five years ago I decided to prepare a sermon with what I thought at the time was a straight-forward unambitious objective: to present an answer to a very simple but important theological question: why does God allow bad things to happen to innocent people?
Before I even write another sentence, I need to state that the answer I meant to discuss in the sermon is not original to me. In the next article I will discuss more about the source, but it was actually proposed hundreds of years ago. What is original to me is the fact that I could not let it go once I started working on it. I preached the sermon about five years ago and have spent the time since then discovering that one answer led to another, and then to a different way of looking at parts of scripture, then fundamental principles of the gospel, and even to the very core of what it is to be human in an existence governed by a loving God. In short, the objective proved not to be straight-forward at all. And while the question could be said to be simple, the answer certainly is not.
Along the way I realized that for all of this to make sense, it must have been in place before anything else: before modern history, Jesus, before Moses, before Eden and even before the seven “days” of creation. That is why I decided to call it the ‘precursor’ answer. I mean that the answer to the question was not a response to it, it was something much more foundational. It had purpose well before any bad thing ever happened to any innocent person.
And if the answer which I came across is true, then other things must also be true. And then the list of those things that must also be true started growing.
In Logic, we call it an “if - then” statement. First, I decided that it needed to be more than one sermon. Then I decided it needed to be a series of videos, and I even made a few of them. But it kept growing. Maybe a book? I asked a very dear friend of mine if she would read a book like that if I wrote it and with the honesty I love so much about her she simply said “no, I don’t think so”.
“So how about a series of Substack articles?”
“Sure, then if you wanted to make a book you could just print them and put them in a notebook.”
Here is the thought that started my questioning. You know, the kind of moment where the words “wait a minute…” pop into your head.
We all know that the most common biblical answer to the question why is there evil in the world, is that God did not cause it, we did. It can all be traced back to the events in the garden of Eden when we disobeyed and were cast out of the garden. Whether the story is literally true or allegorically true is not important. The truth being suggested is the same. That is the moment when we and all of the world fell from grace, the moment we disobeyed. And pain, death, and suffering came into the world.
Here is the thought that I mentioned above: how could Got not have known we were going to do that? I mean, in no Michelangelo masterpiece mural that I could even begin to imagine would there be a depiction of a glorious God scratching his head saying, “well THAT certainly wasn’t on my Bingo card…”
No. He knew.
And while the Eden story is, of course, undeniable from a scriptural context, the problem is that it answers a different question. It does answer the question why there is pain, death, and suffering in the world. But it does not answer the question why God would allow it in the first place.
Most of you who are reading this (and others of my articles) know that for a number of years I have been involved in a counseling ministry where I work with men who were abused as children. I have often noticed how angry they are. And although I have only worked intensely with about a dozen over the years, I can only call to mind one of them that did not explicitly describe to me that their most virulent anger was not directed at their abuser(s), it was reserved for God.
And I remembered a day when one of my closest brothers in Christ took me aside and gently told me that he was worried about me. He told me that I was no longer like the man he knew and loved; I had become bitter. What neither of us knew was that it wasn’t recent, it wasn’t a becoming, it was fundamental to me. And years after that another brother in Christ took me up to the rooftop of his home in Mexico to pray for me (please see my article “On a Rooftop in Mexico”). I was one of those angry men.
So I began asking myself the question why God would allow bad things to happen to innocent people. I mean, one and a half million children are estimated to have been murdered in Nazi Germany. I think that it would be pretty hard for a loving, omnipotent God to explain allowing that.
On careful examination the anger toward God is in a sense, unique. In is an anger in response to indifference. How could an omnipotent God who is supposed to be so loving actually be so tragically indifferent? Either He is not loving, not omnipotent, or the whole thing is a lie, and He doesn’t even exist. And even if He does exist, under the circumstances, who wants a god like that?
What sealed my near obsession with this answer was the growing realization that the answer is not indifference, that it has nothing to do with indifference. It has everything to do with something far more ironic. Something that I never would have guessed.
Love.
As I said earlier, if it is true, and that it was in place before the very first person was ever created and the very first bad thing ever happened then a lot of other things must also be true. I will try to lay them out as best I can in coming articles and they will proceed in the following topic groups in this order: Introductions (2), His Love (3), The Damage (3), Identity (4), Forgiveness (5) and Forward (4). My goal is to publish one per week.
I hope you will read on…
John Villegas-Grubbs
john.greyjump@gmail.com
A good article that makes you want to read more!