Why God?

Why God?
Why, if God is good and God is love, is there a hell?
Why, if God is good and God is love, does He permit evil to reign?
Why does God allow innocents such as children to suffer?
Why is there death, sickness, addiction, crime, corruption, poverty and evil in general?
Why, if God exists and is a God of love, grace and mercy, do the very ones who believe in Him often suffer the most?
How does a person watch a deeply loved friend, spouse, child or family member suffer and die and still believe God is real, loving and merciful?

We, as onlookers to the world around us and the lives of those with whom we share this world see struggle, pain and pure evil and we wonder, why God?
Why doesn’t God move in and do something about the evil in the world? If God is good and loving why doesn’t he just do away with all that’s bad and make everything good?
Why doesn’t He just end suffering and pain?
If He truly is all-powerful God could just eradicate evil and we would all live in a wonderful Eutopia.
Aren’t these the most asked question of the human race, Why God?
For most people, the journey from cradle to grave is lived under a cloud of question marks. However most never seek the answer!

Lots of people use these questions as an excuse to reject God. Rather than seek the answer to these questions they use them as some sort of explanation why God is not real.
How often have we heard this; if God is real how come there’s so much evil in the world?
This unanswered question is used as a basis for believing God doesn’t exist.
However, that’s like saying that rain caused a flood which destroyed my house and I don’t understand it so, rain doesn’t exist. It’s quite absurd.

In the oldest book in the Bible, the Book of Job, the question that Job and his friends spend most of the book talking about is why God permitted evil to come to him.

The old Testament prophets asked this question also. They watched as the nation that is God’s chosen people suffered repeatedly at the hands of their enslavers.
Although they tirelessly warned the people of forthcoming slavery unless they turned from their evil, the prophets were horrified at the brutality and the completeness of the conquering of Israel. How could God let this happen to His people?

The prophet, Habakkuk asked precisely that. Why was God permitting evil to manifest itself and run rampant in the nation of Israel? Why does God permit evil? Why would a holy, gracious, good God permit these things to take place?
Habakkuk 1:2-4 says, and I’m reading from the New Living Translation,  How long, O LORD, must I call for help? But you do not listen! “Violence is everywhere!” I cry, but you do not come to save. Must I forever see these evil deeds? Why must I watch all this misery? Wherever I look, I see destruction and violence. I am surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. The law has become paralyzed, and there is no justice in the courts. The wicked far outnumber the righteous, so that justice has become perverted.

Habakkuk is telling God that He is refusing to answer his prayers as he cries out in despair amidst the violence among his people. And God is doing nothing and saying nothing.

Jeremiah, the so-called weeping prophet, wrote the little book of Lamentations where he bitterly mourns the destruction of Jerusalem. He had warned of this coming destruction and the slavery of the nation by the Babylonians under the command of King Nebuchadnezzar, but no one would listen.
Jeremiah stands among the ashes weeping.
Lamentations 1:1. Jerusalem, once so full of people, is now deserted. She who was once great among the nations now sits alone like a widow. Once the queen of all the earth, she is now a slave.

The first explanation for the fall of the city comes in Lamentations 1:8;
Jerusalem has sinned greatly, so she has been tossed away like a filthy rag. All who once honoured her now despise her, for they have seen her stripped naked and humiliated. All she can do is groan and hide her face.
Jerusalem has geatly sinned!

Throughout the Bible, we see again and again God warning His people through His prophets, sometimes many decades in advance. Then we see His people failing to acknowledge Him and then destruction finally engulfing them.
We don’t like to hear about the fierce anger of God today. That aspect is often left out of the gospel message in the modern church.
Perhaps we need God as a crutch, a prop of goodness in the middle of an evil world. We seem to need at least some hope that there is still a force for goodness and righteousness, but we fall into a trap.
The trap is that we want that goodness and righteousness based on our own, pitifully inadequate viewpoint of what it really is.
In fact, we want goodness and righteousness without the justice. We hate justice, especially when it’s us being judged. So we try to change God to make Him something He’s not. We try to make Him a good, righteous God full of mercy and grace but who is without justice.
This doesn’t work. We’re making an idol.

God is, for sure, that assurance of good amongst evil, but we need to face up to the fact that God’s righteous includes perfect justice along with His love.
God judges sin, and He is righteous in doing so, however, He never forgets to be merciful. There’s always a way out for God’s people if they’ll come His way.
We can get no comfort from a fairy tale god who doesn’t exist.
The real God is much more wonderous and, in the middle of His fierce wrath and His ultimate justice, we begin to realise an important truth.

God is love and He is merciful and full of grace but, it is because of His character that He must also be the God of perfect justice.
No one, not even the most devout Christian can get God to turn a blind eye to justice.
Can it be any other way?

Look at the dismal failure of our man-ruled court system where more and more the criminal is the victim and is pitied and shown mercy whereas the true victims of crime are left alone to suffer.
Fair go, you can murder someone today and be out of prison in a few years, and you will enjoy many creature comforts and benefits while you’re in there.
As much as we don’t want to hear it, God gets angry. He judges sin.
This is a total necessity for a complete, whole and free universe.
Prisons are required if freedom is to work. Hell is the safeguard of heaven.
A state that doesn’t punish crime is doomed and a God Who tolerates evil without judging it is not a good God.

If God failed to judge evil there would be no security and no peace. The world’s history is a parade of kings, dicatators and governments who punish good and reward evil.
They’ve ruled their subjects with hatred and murder when those subjects didn’t conform to the rulers’s will, even when that will was born from injustice and evil.

We’re living in a universe where there is a God, a living God, a God whose heart goes out in love and yearning over all of us. However, we must never forget that if you turn your back on Him, He will judge you even though He still loves you.
Our God is the righteous God of this universe who judges it from perfect love and with perfect justice.
Hell exists because He is a God of love and a God of righteousness and a God of holiness. The whole universe, including Satan himself, will admit that God is righteous and just in all He does. We dare not trifle with Him.
God does what He does because He is righteous. He cannot shut his eyes to evil. When His own children disobey Him, God must discipline them, even though it breaks His heart.

Jeremiah reveals to us the heart of God: when Jeremiah weeps, God is weeping; when he sorrows, God is sorrowing. When we don’t understand what is happening, the important thing is to trust in knowing that God is righteous in what He does.
He was right in letting Jerusalem be destroyed and in letting the people go into captivity, just as He is right in letting happen whatever will happen in our own lives even though it breaks His heart. It’s just that we struggle understand why.

In the modern church, God is either a religious icon who is only known through statues, paintings and the traditions of man, never taken seriously or counted as relevant in the everyday lives of the churchgoers. Or He is a “nice” God who only exists to be our friend and rich relative who loves us so much He’ll turn a blind eye to our wrongdoings and instead, gives us our every desire.

The real God, the God Who reveals Himself to us in His Word is much different. The real God reveals that it is He who controls the universe, not man and not His enemy, Satan.
The real God was still God amidst the horrors of the millions murdered in Auschwitz and Birkenau, Sobibor and the other 100 Nazi extermination camps.
He was still God during the battle of the Somme, Flanders and Gallipoli.
He was still God in the pogroms of Russia where millions were murdered and tortured and, during Pol Pot’s murder spree which saw approximately 2 million of the Cambodian population murdered.
God was still God during the reign of terror that was the French revolution and the more modern “mini” reigns of terror from serial killers like Jeffery Darmer, Jack the Ripper, and the Yorkshire ripper.
There has never been an economic crash or a death-inducing famine, or a flood or a fire where God was not in control.
Likewise, there is not now nor never has been an inept, corrupt or evil government in power in the earth where God was not in control.
In the godless atheism of the modern-day through the absurdity of evolution that’s passed off as scientific fact, God is in control!

Notice, that God is in control, not His enemy Satan as modern churchgoers often think. Satan could not exist even for one moment if God was not sustaining him. Even this, the ultimate source of evil, is subject to God and His will.
Now, I’m firmly convinced that if God sat me down and tried to explain to me every minute circumstance surrounding this world’s catastrophes, I’d be pathetically unable to understand the complexity of it.
To demonstrate, when I got prostate cancer my brilliant doctor took great pains to explain the treatment we would undergo. There were snippets here and there that I could understand but only if he kept his description reduced to laymen’s terms.
Whenever he strayed even slightly into deeper medical explanations all I could do was look at him blankly. I simply didn’t understand it all.
What I was left with was a choice. I could walk out because I didn’t understand every detail or I could simply put my trust in him, which is what I did. In the operating theatre, even though I was nervous about what was about to happen, and even though I could not understand the complex operation and the radium treatment that followed, I still trusted that doctor. As a result, I have been cancer-free for five years.

Perhaps, the most misunderstood factor in life is the utter devastation and the magnitude of the evil of man’s sinful nature. We have no ability to understand just how completely the fall of man affected every molecule in the universe.

So, in summary, can we answer, “Why God, does evil abound and why does it fall on the innocent? Why me Lord?”
Yes, we can answer but it won’t satisfy the natural mind. Why? Because we simply can’t see the complexity of the circumstance that make up everything that happens in life.

Christians were never promised a rose-covered pathway of health, wealth and happiness in this life. That’s reserved for the next phase, the upgrade.
When we suffer, as we all will, our challenge is to learn that in the middle of our failure to understand why life is still worth living.
More than anything else suffering applies burning coal to our faith.
Do I really believe that God is working all things for my good as He promises in Romans 8:28?
Is my mind made up to trust in God’s plan for my life – even if I don’t understand it?

We’re being educated for eternity, and one of the main lessons concerns the breaking of our arrogance and pride. It’s that pride that is the sole ingredient of sin. It demands to know everything. We need to learn to reject that pride and exchange it for trust.
When we surrender our lives to God’s care, trusting in Him alone for everything we need, we forsake our demand to understand and we become aware of how deeply our understanding differs from God’s.
We simply can’t fully understand everything now but we can trust in His Word. He is in control, and I know, someday soon, He’ll make it all crystal clear to me.
1Corinthians 13:12 says,  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
We’re left with just one option; we trust Him. Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.  Proverbs 3:5-6.
How do we trust in Him with all our hearts?

We accept and believe that the drama, the catastrophe that has befallen humanity known as sin and the resulting eternal death that it brings has been handled.
It was paid for by the Lord Himself in His death on a cruel cross 2000 years ago and by His burial and His resurrection according to ancient scripture.
We accept Jesus’s promise to us in John 11:25 – 26, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

God said it, I believe it, that settles it!