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In this episode, we look at one of the biggest questions asked of Christianity...If God is love and all-powerful, why do bad things happen? Or similarly, why is there evil in the world? While that is a question way beyond a 20-minuite podcast, Glenn gives a glimpse into how bad things began, and what God has already done about it.
This episode has a transcript. If your podcast app does not support transcripts, please go to the podcast page of https://spiritledhope.com/ .
If you have questions or comments, please send an email to glenn@spiritledhope.com.
Send a text to Spirit-Led Hope!
In this episode, we look at one of the biggest questions asked of Christianity...If God is love and all-powerful, why do bad things happen? Or similarly, why is there evil in the world? While that is a question way beyond a 20-minuite podcast, Glenn gives a glimpse into how bad things began, and what God has already done about it.
This episode has a transcript. If your podcast app does not support transcripts, please go to the podcast page of https://spiritledhope.com/ .
If you have questions or comments, please send an email to glenn@spiritledhope.com.
Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are talking about how:
GOD IS LOVE, BUT BAD THINGS HAPPEN
In the last episode (Episode 21), I mentioned that we would be talking in this episode about the gifts of healing. As I started thinking about how to cover the topic, I was confronted with a, really, a very simple fact that we all know. And it is this…when it comes to healing, not everyone is healed the way we would like them to be.
Our experience in life is that bad things happen. We see natural disasters and then we see acts of evil like shootings or bombings. Then there are diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Our experience in life is that people suffer. And Christians are not immune to this. I live with a disease that affects my immune system, and my wife has Stage 4 cancer. If God loves me and God loves my wife, why doesn’t he take her cancer away and heal me of my disease? So, we are going to change direction a bit and we are going to deal with this question first.
And this question is so big, that it keeps many people from becoming Christians. The way the question is normally phrased, is something like this…if God is all loving and all powerful, then why do we have evil and suffering in the world? I mean, why would a loving God ever allow evil or bad things to happen?
Personally, I believe this is such an important question, that every believer, I think, must take the time to answer it to their own satisfaction. This is the type of question that may take a long time to fully answer. And I think I could make a case that suffering is required for you to feel comfortable with your answer. I do not like saying that, but I believe it is true.
This is one of those of those questions where it may seem easy to answer by presenting a series of Bible verses, and we will look at Bible verses. But experientially living out the Bible verses while you are suffering, that is a whole different thing.
I have compassion for people that reject God or Christianity because something awful happened, like a rape, or a miscarriage, or being bullied at school, or a loved one died early. Events like these can cause us to have an existential crisis where we question the existence of God or have anxiety about our own place in the world.
But let me say right up front, that I am not going to answer every question you may have about evil, pain, and suffering in a 20-minute podcast! But I can point to some of the things I have learned on my journey. But you need to do your own heavy processing, just like every Christian that has suffered before us.
Now the good news is that God allows us to have hope in the middle of suffering. My prayer for you, is that you finish this episode with an impartation of God’s hope.
One of the first questions we have when looking at this topic is, “Why didn’t God make everything good? Why didn’t he just leave out the junk that we see today?
The answer to that question is that God did create a universe where everything was good. This is what we read in Genesis 1:31:
And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Think about that…our world started out very good. The world was in perfect harmony. The first humans, Adam and Eve, had perfect health and direct communication with God. There was no disease or evil.
So, what happened? What caused the world to go from perfect harmony to what we have today?
I find it interesting that the answer to this question is found in the first few pages of the Bible. In the opening of Genesis, we read that God created the universe, and then life on earth. The culmination of the creation of life, ended with Adam and Eve, living in what we know as the Garden of Eden.
Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. One of the traits we get from being like God is that we have free will, or the freedom to choose. This is critical to understand. God is love, and love allows the capacity to choose. Freedom, and the freedom to choose, is one of our core values as humans. We react very strongly if someone tries to take our freedom away.
My wife, my children, and grandchildren, get to choose whether they love me and want to be in relationship with me. In fact, if I forced them to love me, it would be meaningless.
I had a phone app once that told me I was its BFF, its best friend forever. Did that mean anything to me? No, because it was the output of some software engineer creating something to be cute.
Because God values our love, he created us with the dignity to be something more than a phone app. We can choose to love God or not to love God. And this freedom of choice extends into a freedom of will in all aspects of our life.
One of the choices Adam was given, was to use his free will to obey God. God placed a tree in the Garden of Eden, called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God explained to Adam that he could eat from any tree, but that one. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that one, would bring death.
Now we need to step back just a bit. Although it is not clear when, the Bible lets us know that God also created the spiritual beings that we know as angels. Angels were also given free will. One of the angels, who we know as Satan, rebelled against God and other angels followed. That moment, that was the true beginning of bad things.
I think most people have heard some account of how Satan, disguised as a serpent, deceived Eve and she ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and then Adam quickly followed and did the same. When this happened, sin entered the human race. We call this moment when man rebelled against God, “The Fall.”
When Adam and Eve sinned, they were separated from God, and they experienced an immediate spiritual death. Their physical bodies began to decay and they were on the path towards physical death.
The effects from The Fall were tangible and real. Every human descended from Adam and Eve (that includes us) inherits this brokenness. Everyone is born with a sinful nature…a propensity to sin. Not only did it effect humankind’s relationship with God and each other, but the earth itself somehow became broken. The earth began to act differently, and it was no longer the safe haven it had been.
Paul recognized this and he said it this way, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.”
In addition to everything we just mentioned, this was the start of the on-going spiritual battle between us and Satan and his followers. Paul says we wrestle against these spiritual forces. He calls them spiritual powers and authorities. Because of The Fall, humanity was broken and then immersed in a broken world apart from God and then under this constant temptation of selfish desires and evil influence.
This is not a pretty picture. In fact, it sounds like a place where people will get hurt.
Now if you are listening and you do not believe in the existence of God, or of spiritual things, I think it is easy to think of this account of the Garden and serpent as something kind of mythical. Yet we see and experience the truth of the Biblical account, of sin and evil and brokenness, every day. For example, you don’t need to teach children to be selfish. We often see people looking out for themselves, hurting others around them. We are, really, forced to create governments and laws to try and create harmony because it does not come naturally. When it comes to describing human nature, the Biblical account has proven itself to be accurate.
So, that is the origin story of why bad things happen.
The question we have now is, “What is an all-powerful and loving God going to do about bad things?”
Here is, really, the great news…it is not about what God is going to do to fix this mess, it is about what he has already done!
I do not know God’s reasoning of why he allowed everything to happen the way it has…I mean, only God has the complete picture. But this I know…God was not caught off-guard by any of this.
God made provision for us to be reunited with him, he made provision for the eradication of evil, and he made provision for the renewing of the world. He did all of this through the sacrifice of Jesus.
The death and resurrection of Jesus paid the price for what happened at The Fall. When we put our faith and trust in Jesus, the separation we experience from God is removed.
Everything Satan accomplished through Adam and Eve was overcome by Jesus. Colossians 2:15 says what Jesus did this way:
And having disarmed the power and authorities, he (Jesus) made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
So, think about that. Satan is defeated. Scripture also tells us, that in a future day, heaven and earth will be made new. It will no longer be damaged.
But if Satan is defeated, why do we still have spiritual battles?
An imperfect analogy would be to think of a war where the leaders of the enemy have surrendered. None of us would be surprised if the enemy soldiers kept fighting even though there were terms of surrender. In fact, in WWII one soldier fought for 29 years after the peace treaty. The victory is won, but we cannot let our guard down because we are still fighting those spiritual powers and authorities.
But if that is the case, how long do we have to wait for bad things to end?
I do not know! I do know that Peter and the early church had the same question. Peter said this in 2 Peter 3:9:
The LORD is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
So, we know that God is waiting for the right time, and this has something to do with his love for all people.
In the meantime, we do find ourselves in a place of tension. We know that ultimately evil will be gone, sickness and suffering will end, and all the world will be made right. But we still have bad things happen to us spiritually and physically. There is still evil. And we still get hurt.
So, if bad things are still going to happen while we wait for the renewing of all things, has God just left us to fend for ourselves? I mean, has he left us in a state of suffering just to suffer?
And the answer to that is no, he has not.
God is good and he is not doing evil things. While we are waiting, God does something amazing. It is beyond our full comprehension. See, God uses the bad things for our benefit.
I am going to read a series of verses showing a glimpse of what we gain through suffering. But I want to be sensitive about this. If you are in the middle of suffering as you listen to this, these verses may be very hard to receive. What I do not want to do, is sort of throw these verses in your face and minimize the struggle and pain you may be going through right now.
Some of these verses cannot be received or understood until after you are through the worst. But if you can, hang on to these verses and allow them to give you hope. Hope that something good can and will come out of the suffering you are experiencing now.
And if you are not suffering now, remember these verses when you are. And let them impart hope into that future situation.
Okay, here we go:
So, Paul, the man beaten multiple times, thrown in jail, and he was martyred, wrote this:
We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:3-5
And he also wrote:
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28
Suffering allows us to grow stronger, to become more like Jesus, and it transforms us into people of hope. Bad things ultimately have great benefit. We know from experience, that we grow through the tough times, not through the easy.
There is a future benefit to our current struggles. James, also martyred, said this:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:2-4
What we see is that trials produce what we need and help us mature. You know, Paul had a lot of trials which is probably why he wrote so much about them. Paul also points out that if we pray and seek God in our struggles, thankful for his Presence with us, we receive peace. This is what he writes:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus: Philippians 4:6-7
These are just a few verses that show how God is with us in our suffering and will turn it into good. These verses are not just lip service. They were written by people that were tortured, thrown in prison, abused, and murdered. I mean, what was true for them is true for us.
As a word of advice…if you do know someone that is suffering right now, especially someone who does not believe in God…I think we should be careful about casually quoting these verses to try and make them feel better. Let us be sensitive to the pain people may be experiencing and instead, focus on being present with them. These verses can be presented at the right time when they will bring hope and healing.
In this episode we gave a foundational understanding of why bad things happen, and what a loving God has done about it. In the next episode, we are going to give some examples of what it looks like to see these verses come true.
As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, questions, or want to share part of your story, please email me at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com . That is spiritledhope.com.
As we close this episode…May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Until next episode, take care.