Yesterday, while discussing Job, I made this statement:

Everything that happens MUST either happen because He directly caused or it because He indirectly allowed it, otherwise He would not be God. Ideally, we would never be in an environment where the Devil could do such evil to us, but that was our choice, not God’s. More on that tomorrow.

Welcome to tomorrow!

A critic of God might read the above quote and think: “Gotcha! If God allows evil, then He is not all-good, and if He tries to stop it but fails, then He is not all-powerful!” With that, the happy atheist walks away thinking he’s “defeated the idea of God” or something. Without retreading the ground I covered yesterday (talking about how foolish it is for our limited minds to try to impose our limited understanding of morality on the eternal God), let’s take that same idea and look at it another way.

When someone dies, it’s not uncommon for a faithless (or faith-wavering) person to say: “How could God let that person die!”

At the risk of being insensitive, I would respond like this: “Well…what’s He supposed to do? Put them in a special place where there is no death?” Is your loved one so special that only he/she should be spared the curse of death that we all fall under? To that, I’m sure, the person would say: “No, He should put ALL of us in a special place where there is no death.”

I agree. You know who else agrees?

GOD!

He did that. He put us in a special place where there was no death. He put us in Eden. And what did we do? We rejected Him and chose to live for ourselves. In response, we were forced out of Eden. Now we live in a fallen world, where there is pain, suffering, and death. Whose fault is that? Not God’s!

Now again, to that, a person might say: “But I’m not Adam! I’m not Eve! I didn’t sin in Paradise. I didn’t have a choice to be born in a world where there is pain, suffering, and death.” And that’s true, but you know what else is true? God did not leave Adam and Eve after they sinned. He enacted a plan for redemption that culminated in the Cross. Through it, everyone in this fallen world—all who have sinned (Romans 3:23)—can be saved, added to the spiritual Kingdom of Jesus, the New Eden, and given the promise of eternal life, so that, beyond death in this world, there remains life evermore with God (John 11:25).

~Matthew