"If there is a loving God, how does he allow so many bad things to happen?"
Virtually any lengthy discussion on Christianity or God eventually includes this concept. If God is all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful then does the allowance of evil in the world mean there can't be a God? If you think there is a God then does that mean it is an evil God?
Indeed, just listen to the media or people talking and you realize a lot of evil things happen in this world every day.
Some, like atheists, assert this means there can not be a God, or if there is it is an evil God. This posts asks the question in response, "Is that necessarily so?"
Indeed, an all-powerful, loving God CAN allow evil in the world.
Since these posts are largely opinion (backed up by facts) here is the author's take.
A Take On The Meaning Of Life - Albert Wagner
God created everything and has a plan for everything. This plan will ultimately win in the end. A primary purpose God created in the first place was to share his love with Creation. However the catch phrase is that he wants the love shared to be genuine, and not forced. If God forced his Creation to love him what would that really mean? He even had the option of not creating at all.
Thus along came free will. Free will means that God gave people choices they could decide for themselves. Perhaps God thought that if his Creation chose to follow him it would really mean something. If you do something only because you have to it does not elicit the same response that doing it because you want to does.
The problem is that if people have a choice then they will sometimes make a bad choice. The Bible tells believers
"The wages of sin is death." - Epistle To The Romans 6:23
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It could fairly be inferred that this quote implies that there are consequences to bad decisions people make. Naturally some of these consequences to bad decisions involve evil things. If you commit a violent crime, for example, then bad things will happen to you and to others.Does The Presence Of Evil Mean There Is No God?
People seem to equate God with love and not with the bad things. It follows that if God is love then the world should be a nice, enjoyable place. This is true sometimes, but we also know this is not true at other times.Here's where we look at a different perspective.
If everything in life was perfect and easy then what would "perfect and easy" mean? Easy in relation to what being hard? That is where we begin to get to the essence of these blog posts, which are about the meaning of life.
A life with no evil would lack real, underlying meaning. For example, think of getting a Christmas gift from someone that you know does not like you. If they give the gift because they have to, then what does that really mean to you? It probably does not have a lot of value.
This goes back to the part of the post about God wanting people to come to him genuinely. In the example above, if someone gave you a Christmas present you didn't expect because they wanted to, wouldn't that elicit a different response from you? It probably would have some value. It would at least have more value than if a person felt they had to give it to you.
God has a way of turning BAD things into GOOD things, which is one reason God's ways seem mysterious to humans. The presence of evil gives people a choice to choose God's way, which is what he wants to share in the first place.
This could not happen the same way WITHOUT evil.
You might also be interested in:Getting More Meaning Of Life By Finding Where Evil Came FromReconciling God And Evil In The World
Author: Albert Wagner
