We recognize students have questions about dozens of real-life issues. We have designed this page to be a place where you can ask those questions and we will post a reply to give you a biblical perspective on those questions. To submit your question(s) please click HERE
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Debating Hell…
Here is a great video from Francis Chan, entitled: ”We can’t afford to get it wrong”.
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Why Do Horrible Things Happen?
At some point in life’s journey, everyone faces a senseless tragedy and is forced to ask some tough questions. Why do horrible things happen if God loves us and is powerful enough to stop them?
The Bible is clear about who God is: his power is limitless and his love is unconditional. If these are true, then how can horrible tragedies happen in this world? Doesn’t God’s love mean he wouldn’t want to experience pain and suffering? Doesn’t God’s power mean he has the ability to do something about the pain and suffering in our world?
These are good questions! It makes sense to think like this!
This line of reasoning is on the right track; but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s incomplete, missing a few important truths.
God’s Word has the answers we need. God is love, and he is all-powerful. The next step is to understand the nature of his love for us.
God’s love for us means he has given us a choice. He wants us to love him back, but he doesn’t force us to love him back. We see this in our everyday lives: the best love between two people—in marriage or friendship—is always grounded in choice. You can’t force a married couple to love each other, nor can you make two friends love each other. Love is a decision.
A decision must have a consequence for it to be real. If an action doesn’t have a result, the action is powerless. Parents protect children from the consequences of their decisions (“Don’t eat too much candy or you’ll be sick”). As they get older, children are taught to deal with consequences of their decisions—since this is how the real world works.
God wants us to freely love him, and a choice isn’t real if there is no consequence. Imagine standing in front of two doors. Then God says, “Choose the first door to be with me.” If God was behind both doors, no choice ever existed.
The consequence for not loving God is evil and pain and suffering. God created us in perfect love, which means he gave us choice to love him back. Humanity chose against God and the result broke the world, turning it into a place where horrible things happen. We live in a ruined system, and we often experience pain even when it’s not directly our fault.
So then, did God create evil and pain and suffering? Nope. He didn’t create it and he doesn’t like it. It would be more accurate that he made evil possible, and humanity brought it in the world.
So, here’s a crazy thing to say: pain and tragedy in this world are actually evidence of God’s love for us.
Yea, that’s weird and tough to understand. This is an incredibility difficult teaching to explore. I’m no stranger to pain (my mother died of cancer when I was five). I’ve been thinking about this for decades and it’s often not enough.
Thinking about God is good—it’s how we get to know him better! But there are times when his presence in our lives trumps the limits of our understanding.
If you want to go a little further into the details, here are a few things to consider as you work to discover some answers for your questions:
1. God has Complete Knowledge
God has complete knowledge, he’s never surprised or amazed. He sees the present and the future. He knows what we’ll say before we say it, and he even knows our thoughts. To deny God’s complete knowledge limits God and denies what the Bible clearly teaches.
2. God Defines “Good”
God is good, more than this: God sets the standard for what is good and what is bad. The “goodness” or “badness” of a thing isn’t based on popular opinion, my feelings, or a human system of logic. Is murder wrong? Absolutely! It’s not wrong because our civil laws make it illegal. It’s wrong because God says it’s wrong, it’s not how he designed the world. As children, we learn right and wrong from our parents, friends, and society. No one ever told God what was right and wrong, there is no authority “higher” than him.
3. God Created People With Free Will
People make decisions; we have the ability to choose freely. God created us with this capacity so we could love him back. He doesn’t need our love, but he wants our love. Without choice we would be robots/slaves/zombies locked in a relationship with God.
For a choice to be real, it must carry consequences. Without consequences, choice is only an illusion.
4. Foreknowledge and Choice
God’s complete foreknowledge does not mean our steps have been completely determined. Every parent knows his child will eventually break the rules and rebel is some way. A parent has foreknowledge of their children’s disobedience. This doesn’t take away the child’s choice!
Of course a parent’s foreknowledge is not perfect, like God’s, but the point is that your parents don’t force you to break their rules—they just knew you would. God doesn’t force anybody to break his rules. The choice is ours. God simply knows what and when we are going to choose, because he is God.
5. Love, Choice, and Consequence
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It was good and without the effects of sin. God created everything perfect, without sin, in love. God’s love for Adam and Eve meant that they had the ability to choose between obedience and disobedience. Without love, Adam and Even would have had no choice and thus been robots without a will of their own. Without choice, God would have been inconsistent: giving them a command and then making them break that command.
Now the choice wouldn’t have been a real choice without consequence. The choice that God presented them with was this: Obey God, and live forever in bliss with all of your needs being met, or disobey God and live a hard life, away from the presence of God (God called this death). Adam and Eve chose to live apart from God. It was humanity’s first sin and the consequences were devastating.
God never wanted Adam and Eve to disobey him. But God also loved them so he presented them with a choice. Remember that God determines what is good and thus his love required choice, and that choice carried consequences. God did not create sin. He created choice.
6. Understanding Sin
God was clear when he commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree. He said that disobedience would mean death, a spiritual death, which was separation from his presence. They ate the forbidden fruit and then experienced death.
God created Adam and Eve in his own perfect image. However, they passed on a broken image to their children, and ultimately to the entire human race (Genesis 5:3; Romans 5:12-19). Once sin entered the world, people were condemned to live destructive, painful, imperfect lives. One of Adam’s sons murdered the other. The fall from perfection to murder happened within a single generation!
Sin is like a poison and it infects and ruins every shred of our being, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We exchange God’s truth for our own assumptions, our vision darkens, we run from God, our emotions become tainted, and our understanding is warped.
God hates sin. He hates the suffering and pain and separation that it creates.
This is where Jesus enters the picture! God solves this whole human mess by sending His Son. Paul recognized this truth, and it caused him to write, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:23-24)
Final Thoughts
God loves everyone in the entire world, and he wants everyone to be in a loving relationship with him:
“For [God] wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” _ 1 Timothy 2:4
“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” _ John 3:16
God’s love for us:
(1) He created humanity in perfect relationship with him and the world.
(2) He created the ability for us to choose to love him back. A forced relationship, one without choice, is not a love relationship.
(3) In spite of us rejecting him, we can have a restored relationship with God through faith in Jesus. Jesus died a real death to pay a price we couldn’t pay and defeated death so that we can have eternal life.
_ Matt McGill