Why does bad stuff happen? A valid question - the world is full of bad stuff. But I seem to hear this a lot, especially in conjunction with, "If there's a God..."
The conclusions people come to are either that there isn't a God, or the alternative is that God either doesn't care, or allows bad stuff to happen to people, so He mustn't be a very kind God. Two very logical sounding conclusions.
What if there's another option? What if we zoom out a little and we do something radical? What if we start to see the big picture, and start to apportion blame where it actually belongs?
As a species, we apportion all the bad stuff that happens in the world to God, and we apportion all the good things to "good fortune", "luck" or "chance", which to be fair, are all the same thing: a random coincidence not attributed to anything or anyone. That's a very unfair way to look at life, and not very fair to God!
So let's break this argument down. Firstly, the question is often asked by people who don't pray or acknowledge God in their lives.
Let's look at a snapshot of our society here in England. A recent study showed that nearly half - 48.6 per cent - of UK adults say they are not religious, compared to just 43 per cent who are Christian. And of those who identify as Christian, most don't go to church. Only around 11% of the population go to church. So nearly 90% of us don't go to church, and more of us identify as non-religious than do as Christian.
On the whole then, as a nation, we don't have lives that centre around God in any way. We have removed God from nearly everything we do. There's no place for God in our politics, in our schools, in our careers, our TV screens, we don't even put Christ in the centre of our Christian festivals! We have Christmas without Christ, and Easter without the Cross. There are children who do not know what we celebrate Easter for!
- We remove God from our schools, abolish hymns and prayers
- We abolish God and His commands, His guidance from our political world
- We actively promote and champion the things He is against (abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex to name a few) in the name of freedom and free-choice
- We don't go to church
- We persecute those who do have a faith (suing people for standing up for their beliefs, telling them they can't wear a small item of jewellery depicting the cross, and we can't share our faith because we "offend" people)
- We ignore the greatest act of love - the Cross - which cost Him dearly. An act of love He did knowing we will reject Him, we will ignore Him, yet He still did it. We effectively spit in His face, saying "God doesn't love us, He's not kind"
So we have removed God from everything we do in this country. We have put up our hand and said, No thanks God we'll do it our way. We live our lives our way, without God.
In addition to taking God out of all areas of our lives, we persecute and ridicule Him and His people at every turn.
The next important point that we always overlook is that He has given us free will. If we were in some kind of "matrix" style reality where we could be manipulated, controlled and had limited power of decision and will, we would be arguing that we don't have free will, being used as robots and that God is a despot.
We have an option to do good or do bad. Most of the bad stuff that happens is a result of people using their free will and doing bad things. Take away our free will and we're back to robot scenario.
Everyone has an option to turn to God, or turn away from Him. We have turned away from God as a society. As such, we have shut the door on His help and said no to His goodness. We've said, we'll do this our way, we'll run this country our way, we'll teach our kids what we want to teach them not how You say and then we wonder why creation is messed up?
When we shut the door to God, He'll wait on the other side, but He won't force His way in. He respects our free will decision.
We don't know what it is like to live in a society that puts God first, but here's a revolutionary idea: if we did, maybe we would experience less "bad stuff" happening?!
If we started letting God into our lives, maybe He could help us.
So why does bad stuff happen, and why doesn't God do anything about it? Because we don't let Him.
We play the blame game and instead of taking responsibility for our actions as humans, we blame someone else. Right from the very beginning, we've been blaming others. Adam blamed God for him sinning because God gave Eve to him. Eve blamed the serpent.
When are we going to stop blaming everyone else, take responsibility that we all make decisions and do bad things? When are we going to stop using God as a scapegoat for bad stuff when the blame belongs with us?