How can a loving God let bad things happen to innocent people (I.e.children)? This a big question and one that I believe keeps many people from putting their faith and trust in Him. They just cannot resolve this question for themselves. I've been thinking about this question lately and doing some research for a project I am working on that has drawn me to try and tackle it.
First and foremost I think it's inherently important to understand that when God created us He gave us free will. We have the ability in ourselves to make decisions. We can choose to do right or we can choose to do wrong. Why did God give us this ability? Why not just make people always choose to do the right thing? Because if He did this then He would have a planet full of robots. God created people in order to be able to have a genuine relationship with them. He had to give us free will so that we could choose to have that relationship with Him or decide not to.
So with the ability to choose to do the right thing, maybe a question we need to be asking ourselves along with the title of this entry is: Why do PEOPLE do bad things to innocent people ( i.e. children)? As I mentioned I've been working on a project and in so doing have been reading about the practice of infanticide in the ancient world. Infanticide was the common practice of drowning or abandoning to the elements, a baby who either by their female gender or by some deformity, was deemed unacceptable by the family or community. Apparently to my ignorance and quite frankly horror, this happened ALL the time in the ancient world and was perfectly acceptable. As a mother I just cannot wrap my mind around this. How could a mother lay eyes on her child and then think nothing to lay her tiny baby out on a cold road to die? Did the baby's cries not pierce her? But they did this frequently.
The Old Testament is actually chalk full of Godless people doing all sorts of awful things. Many people look at Old Testament scriptures as examples of a cruel God raining down anger and punishment. But the actuality of His anger was due in cause to the actions of people who were making really evil choices. Here are just some examples that are referenced in the bible, "Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God‑haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless." (Romans 1:28-31 NIV84)
Interestingly enough in regards to the practice of infanticide, the one culture in the ancient world that actually abhorred it were the Jews. Why? Because God had given them laws, rules to help them determine what was right and what was wrong. He chose them to receive His laws as well as the knowledge of the consequences for not following them. Eventually this manual of sorts was spread far and wide, and with the spread of Christianity, the bible has helped form our moral code. In present day Judeo-Christian nations the practice of infanticide is no longer, while it is still practiced in other parts of the world.
Why is this illustration important? We are born with an innate sense of right and wrong. We could choose to do right, but inevitably we all choose at some point to do wrong. Clearly those of you reading this would never kill a baby, but where is the right and wrong line drawn? Where does your wrongdoing go from baby killer bad to somewhat acceptable? The fact is: sin is sin no matter how small. God is the only one who determines what is considered wrong and he has done so very specifically. So if God intervened every time a person makes a choice to do something horrific, then He would need to intervene for even the tiniest transgression. And that brings us back to the problem of us not being robots and Him giving us free will. If He stopped us every time we were about to do something wrong then we would never actually be choosing to do anything out of free will.
The problem therefore is not God. He is good and perfect. The problem is us. The bible says, "All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one...All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God... (Romans 3:12,23 NIV84). Not just those who kill babies. All of us. So where does that leave us? If God is not to blame and we are, then what do we do? We keep reading that verse: "...and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished– (Romans 3:24, 25 NIV84). There in God solves the problem of sin.
Does that make it easy to read stories about horrible things happening to those who don't deserve it? No it doesn't. But someday He will make things right. He will come back and wipe out all the evil in the world. In the meantime He is waiting to do so. Why? He is waiting because He wants to save as many as He can. We clearly can't be right before Him based on our own choices. But we can if we do so through His Son.
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