Why Do Bad Things Happen If We Have a Good God?

For the audio version, click below:

(This one’s a bit longer than usual, but please bear with me through the whole thing. 😅

This is rather a tough question, and I’ve struggled with it a lot,

so I hope it helps you, too, if you’ve wondered the same things!)

Why do bad things happen if we have a good God?  This is a question that’s probably crossed most of our minds—especially in the last year as we’re shocked by the many lives that COVID-19 has claimed, as we’re appalled by the injustice of discrimination, and dismayed at random disasters like fires and earthquakes.

I’ve struggled a lot with why God allows awful things to happen—wrestling with this many, many times in various circumstances: innocence taken, being exposed to abuse, the destruction of my family through strife and betrayal, cancer taking 4 loved ones one after another within 5 years of time…

I thought God was supposed to be good, and if He’s good and has control over all that happens, why do bad things happen to good people, to innocent people, to children? 

God doesn’t blame us for having these feelings.  We can express them to God, and He will listen.  He’s not afraid to hear our anguish.  He will not shut us down or shut us out.  He will endure.  He’s strong enough to take it.  God will not subtly, not-so-subtly try to talk us out of our feelings or reason us out of them.  You can pour out your heart to Him—even if it’s anger toward Him. 

In fact, God not only listens, He gets it.  He may not have been through every instance you’ve been through, but He knows those feelings.  He knows the pain.  He knows the anguish.  He knows the blood, sweat, and tears because he’s felt them.  He’s experienced them with you.  You were never alone.  It may certainly feel like it, but He never left your side.  He never once abandoned you as others did.  With every tear of your heart, His heart was rended, too.  

In John, chapter 11, God shares the story of Mary and Martha who lost their brother Lazarus to sickness.  They were bitter about their loss and upset that Jesus had not come sooner to see them, to save their brother.  Verse 33 says that when Jesus saw Mary weeping, “He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled,” and He wept, too.  Jesus did not see their tears as excessive or dramatic or needless.  He wept with them. 

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After much doubt, through a lot of rumination and discussion, this conclusion finally rang true: Bad things happen because evil exists.  God does not maliciously inflict pain upon us. Sin and evil are the cause of death and sickness and pain, not God. He is just as pained and sad at our experience of suffering as we are—if not more!

Even when God punishes misdeeds, he does not punish us cruelly like maybe some of our parents did.  He tempers the consequences with mercy and only with the purpose of bringing us back to the path that’s safe, the road that leads to good things.  Like a loving shepherd who uses the crook of His staff to gently but firmly hook His beloved sheep away from harm and back into the safety of His green pastures, God disciplines because He loves us, as a wise parent who wants their children to live healthy lives—not like a tyrant god who wants to inflict pain on us for his cruel entertainment.

But we must make a clear distinction between appropriate punishment and evil.  While God is for us—correcting us only when necessary to bring us back to what’s good for us—evil also exists and is against us.  Cancer, blindness, unexplained physical ailments are just a few of the devil’s schemes to steal, kill, and destroy our peace and joy.  Love is the evidence of God’s existence.  Hatred, sickness, and injustice are tangible evidence that evil exists.

But if God is God, and He has control over all things, why doesn’t He stop all evil?  That’s what I wondered!  While God does have control over all things, He does not always exercise it.  He wants good for us; He wants to love us and for us to love Him, but in His deep wisdom, He knew that we humans want and need free will.  We need to have choices, so He gives us power to make choices over our own lives.  If He were to force us to love Him, He knows that would not be real love at all. 

God gives us the choice to be obedient to Him or to disobey Him because the compliance would mean nothing if we didn’t freely choose it, if we were begrudgingly forced to obey.  So, God gives us the choice to do what we want.  This results in a lot of people making a lot of poor choices,  deciding on evil instead of good—often unintentionally. 

which then adds to the “natural” disasters; it results in diseases and ailments resulting from ways that humans abuse and indulge their own minds and bodies, passing these sicknesses down to innocent children who carry on the genes and habits of their parents.

Broken people exercise the free will that God has given them—sometimes in deeply hurtful ways, in harmful words and actions.  Sadly,  this usually exposes us to the very painful consequences of each others’ poor choices—usually wrongs that we did not commit ourselves. This is how the innocent end up suffering.  But, in the wisdom of knowing that there is little worth in treating us like puppets—because a love that is forced upon us is not love at all—God has given us each the freedom to choose to love Him and live lovingly like Him or not. Sometimes, He allows terrible things to happen, and sometimes, He prevents them.  Because we cannot see and know all that is happening in all the world, we will not completely understand why God chooses not to shield us from every evil.

Come to think of it, as much as we’ve been through, maybe He’s protected us from so much more without our even realizing it!  Knowing how rampantly contagious COVID-19 is, imagine how many times we were probably around it but—miraculously—did not contract it.  Or maybe we did have it but recovered or were never even affected by it!  This could have happened without us even being aware of it–as much as we try to protect ourselves! 

Although God is able to prevent every bad thing from happening, He does not because He is neither a control-freak nor a tyrant nor a puppeteer as I used to imagine He was. As much as it brings Him pain to see us suffer and see His children hurt one another or suffer pain from illness, He allows it—but only while fully planning on helping us overcome the pain.  He wants and works to heal us as much as is possible while we’re still limited to these finite, human bodies in this broken world.

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Oftentimes, it sure seems to me, though, that God lets evil run rampant in this world, like He’s not even there or like He’s just watching coldly from afar.  But, the truth is, He cares deeply and is actively working to help us, to save us.  Imagine how much worse the world would be if God wasn’t there at all! : no light, no warmth, no comfort, no love, no joy anywhere. 

The injustices that aren’t dealt with now will be dealt with later.  Rest assured, He will bring justice—all in good time.  Right now, we may not be able to see His power working for good, but don’t lose faith!  One day, He will wipe out all evil and apply punishment where it is due and bring comfort and vindication for those who have been wronged.  God sees everything—even into our hearts—and He sees clearly.  He is not passive but working all of it—even the mistakes we make—for good. 

While we are finite, God is infinite.  No one can understand God and His ways completely, but we trust that He loves us; He is for us; He is not against us (Jeremiah 29:11), and He has been helping us even when we can’t see or feel it. 

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More amazingly yet, God is able to turn evil around for good! That’s even more difficult and requires more power than simply preventing the evil from happening in the first place.  Are we not—every single one of us—stronger for the challenges that we’ve been through? 

Evil is temporary though it feels like forever to us.  One day, God will completely remove all evil.  For the time being, He does much to turn evil into good for us.  Joseph in Genesis said this to his brothers who had tried to kill him: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

I was embittered for a long time, angry with God for allowing the violations and deep pains in my family.  It took a long process for me to realize that God had been with me the whole time and was there to comfort and catch every tear.  I just could not feel Him at that time.  I didn’t even know He existed.  I didn’t acknowledge that He existed. Only after raging at God did I realize that it wasn’t Him who inflicted the pains upon me.  It was the humans around me in their brokenness and me deepening the pain in my confusion and wandering.

but after many years of seeking the Lord and opening myself to Him, for me now, the greatest evidence of God’s power is His ability to heal our pain and free us from fears that bind us so tightly. It is nothing less than God’s miraculous grace and love that I have found much healing and have the freedom from hopelessness that kept me entrapped for most of my life. 

God has helped to heal broken relationships from my past—the very ones I swore I’d never bother with again until someone was dying, if then.  The relationships that were so terribly broken before are now healthier than I ever imagined they could be.  God is the only one who is able to redeem such misery and brokenness. Things that I thought I could never bring myself to do—like trust someone enough to get married—have become possible through God’s powerful healing.

Most wonderfully, every single member of my family that evil tried to destroy in the beginning now knows the Lord and is saved for eternity. Though the process was extremely painful, I don’t think that we four would have been saved had it not happened.  The anguish was worth it because each of us now walks with God and will be in heaven together with Him as well—where we will finally be completely free from every sorrow and struggle!

In spite of all the world’s ugliness, God’s joy comes even in this life! Dreams that I had given up have been revived. God has called me back to my passion for helping others receive inner healing from the Lord and provided ways to fulfill that passion through my church’s ministry—a ministry powerful enough to free generations of families.

Best of all, God has given me the family that I had always longed for. As a child, my family was precious to me even though it was filled with strife and heartache.  It was devastating to see my family torn apart.  I longed for a happy, healthy family that laughed and played together, loved and supported one another.  Now, decades later, God has grafted me into a loving, spiritual family and a church that has the same passions I have: inner healing, relational bonding, emotional honesty and health, and family. God has given me spiritual mothers and fathers as well as brothers and sisters who live for the same God that saved us all!  He is not only able to heal and make things right; He can restore and even bless us tenfold with what was taken from us.

Masterfully, God orchestrates everything together for good. The greatness of our God isn’t simply that He is able to protect us from all evil; He can do that, but what’s even more amazing and more fulfilling is that He is powerful enough to take what was meant for evil and turn it around for deeper good than we can ever imagine!

The devil only comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus came that we may have life and have it abundantly! (John 10:10) While there is evil out there working to bring us down, God is equally present, more powerful as He works to lift us up, turning things around for good. 

God has done that countless times throughout history.  How about Nick Vujicic who was born without arms and legs and now travels the world inspiring and uplifting other people, giving them hope beyond their adversity?  How about Rosa Parks whose response to awful discrimination sparked the civil rights movement?  What about those Mothers Against Drunk Drivers who lost their children to other people’s poor choices?  They were able to turn their grief into a movement that raised the nation’s awareness and cut the number of alcohol-related auto fatalities in half!

How about you?  What has He done to help you turn what was bad into something good?

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And yet, it still begs the question: why does God even let bad happen???

Jesus went through unspeakable torture and humiliation and experienced all the pain—physical and emotional—that we have been through: fear, rejection, sickness, anxiety, betrayal—-and not a single bit of it was a result of any sin of His own!  Jesus experienced such anguish that He sweat blood the night before He allowed Himself to be captured, brutally tortured, and murdered. 

Why did God allow this to happen to His very own one and only beloved Son?  Imagine watching your own children endure such horrific cruelties as whipping and having nails hammered into her or his body!

Imagine that your children—in their rebellion and sin—kept hurting each other.  The more they hurt each other, the farther they drifted from you, so they couldn’t be reached.  They just chose to put more and more distance between you.  The junk they threw at each other just kept blinding them to you more and more. 

Imagine having the power to stop them but choosing to hold back from saving your child because you knew that it was the only way to save your adopted children!  Stopping them from killing your child would mean their ultimate death. 

As excruciating as it was to watch them murder your child, you allowed it to happen because you knew it was the only way to give your adopted children the chance to come back to you.  God rules with justice.  Even humans demand this justice: when someone wrongs us, we demand that someone pay.  We believe that the person who wrongs us has to make it right, apologize, make amends.  Wrongs must be made right.  When someone hurts us, we don’t want them anywhere near us until we feel that they have made amends—until they’re truly sorry.  If someone steals your things, they must give them back.  Wrong must be made right; a debt has to be paid for. 

Our wrongdoings cause a break in our relationship with God, leaving a chasm between us and Him, and that distance can’t be bridged until the sin is paid for. Somebody had to make right the wrongdoings in order for the adopted children to be close to Dad again.  And, since no one else could pay the price—the terribly high price that it took to pay for all the sins of all the people in this world from the beginning of time until eternity—Dad paid it Himself, as only He could.

God allowed His beloved Son to be tortured because He loves us so much!!  He wants that much to have close relationships with us.  He did not want to be an eternity without us.  That’s why He allowed those terrible things to happen even to His most beloved, and He turned it around for good—for our good, for our salvation, for the sake of our souls.

God fully plans on freeing us completely from pain and suffering when we are with Him in heaven for eternity—but this can happen only if we let Him in. He will not barge in because He is respectful; He will intervene if we let Him in to heal the wounds.  As He’s given us free will to choose less than ideal ways, He gives us free will to choose good, to choose Him.  In His wisdom and knowledge of human nature, God knows that forcing His way in will only incite rebellion later.  All He asks is that we acknowledge the sacrifice He made for us.  So, He invites us and patiently waits for us. 

But even if we’ll find freedom from pain in heaven, it still hurts now you say.  We’re still in pain now, as we try to survive in this broken world!

While we are still in these finite bodies in this broken world, we’re hindered from receiving full and complete healing, but God can comfort, heal, and strengthen us greatly in this life and give us a quality of life that no one else can. 

Though we can’t receive the full healing He so longs to give us because we’re still in these bodies, in this life, in this world, He wants to heal those hurts that we don’t understand.  He desires to strengthen and encourage us, helping us conquer the agonies and struggles; we need only let Him into our hearts.

If this is your desire, just pray earnestly to God: Lord, I’m sorry for the things I’ve done to add to this world’s brokenness. Please forgive me for hurting others, myself, and my relationship with You. Thank you for sending Your son, Jesus, to heal that break in relationship between me and You, so that we can be close again. I want to have a real relationship with You. Please come into my heart right now, so I can connect with You and experience more of your love, healing, and strength to overcome this life’s challenges. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen. 🧡