Monday August 06, 2018

 

Why does God allow bad things to happen? When we look across the world, we can see that there are all sorts of disasters, tragedies, crimes, and injustices taking place. People die in earthquakes, tsunamis’, hurricanes, inundations, and all sorts of so-called “acts of God”. Others are murdered, some die of hunger, children are trafficked for sex; the world is full of violence and injustices. For many the question is a lot more personal; why would God allow bad things to happen to me? Why did God allow my parents to abandon me? Why did God allow my marriage to fail? Why did God allow me to become ill? Why did God allow me to lose my Job? After all, I prayed and I trusted God.

 

It is hard to be happy when bad things happen. Truthfully, we live in an imperfect world, a world in which others hurt us, we hurt others, and many times we are hurt by our own bad choices. It is easy to blame God for everything that goes wrong; after all He is God and He ought to have done something. The truth however is, that when God turned the keys to this world over to us, it was a perfect world where sadness, pain, and death were not part of the equation. There were neither tragedies nor injustices and there was no need for laws. God only requested that we not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God never intended for us to know evil but He also did not want to hide anything from us. Yet, we made the decision to disobey Him and in that moment tragedies and all that is bad flooded the world.

 

The reason why God allows bad things to happen to us is because He has given us free will. We are free to choose to do what is right or to do what is wrong. However, we are not free from the consequences of our choices. The reason why God gave us free will is because He wants us to love him and true love is voluntary no coerced. God had to give us the free will to choose between loving and not loving Him, and between doing what is right or what is wrong.

 

 

The good news is, that even when we choose not to love God or when we choose to do the wrong things, God does not stop loving us. If we are willing to turn to Him, He will take all the bad things in our lives and mold them into something extraordinary. God is an expert at producing happiness out of pain; He is the Master at taking our hurts, hang-ups, and bad habits and turning them into blessings. God took a NYC gang leader called Nicky Cruz and turned him into a preacher of good news and hope; a message Nicky has taken all over the world. God can take a drug addict and give him a drug rehab center to help others who have fallen victim to drugs, or a prostitute and give her an outreach to rescue children who are being trafficked for sex. God takes all sorts of moral, legal and social failures and uses them to benefit others. My favorite of all, He took the totally unjust death of Jesus Christ and turned it into a salvation opportunity for EVERYONE.

 

Choosing to be truly happy, is the result of surrendering our lives to God; it is to own our failures, it is to lay at the cross our hurts, hang-ups, and bad habits, it is to yield ourselves to God to be used to bring this good news to others through our actions and words.