Jeremiah 41

There’s just no getting around it—especially when you read a chapter like this. God allows awful stuff to happen in this world. He allows evil men and women to do evil things to innocent people for (apparently) no reason. He allows things to happen to His children that most of us think we would never allow our children to go through if we were in His shoes.

Or would we?

This question of how God is related to the evil and suffering in our world is a persistent problem for both believers and non-believers. You’ve heard the wonderings: Why do bad things happen to good people? If God is good, why does He allow suffering? How could a loving God tolerate evil?

I admit, these are hard questions. And answering them is all but impossible if your context for this life goes no further than the bounds of our planet. If you don’t know that this universe is a universe at war and that our world is the Gettysburg of that war, then you are likely to be confused. I promise you, at The Battle of Gettysburg, nobody was thinking, Gee, why are people dropping like flies all around me? Why do I hear bullets whizzing past my head? Nobody was thinking that, because they all knew what it meant to be on a battlefield.

When Lucifer (who later became Satan) rebelled in heaven, he began an experiment in the universe to see what would happen when created beings separated themselves from their Creator. Unfortunately, we (through Adam and Eve) decided to get personally involved in this experiment. Thus, our world became the battlefield.

Here’s the short answer to the question of what happens when created beings separate themselves from their Creator: nothing good. Sin (the name for this rebellion) ultimately ends in death, preceded by a whole lot of misery, both for the perpetrators and the victims of evil. That’s what the history of this world has revealed, for we have been through more suffering, sorrow, and misery than poor Eve ever could have imagined when she held that piece of fruit in her lovely hand.

So, why did God allow this experiment in the first place? Why does He allow this battle to rage? The only answer is freedom. Love requires freedom, and for us to be capable of loving God, we also had to be capable of rejecting Him. The downside to all of that is that rejecting Him comes with some very bad, albeit mostly temporary, consequences. But removing those consequences would have removed our freedom forever… and God doesn’t mess around with our freedom.

That’s right. When it came to a choice between perpetual peace in a freedom-less universe or a free universe with the possibility of suffering, God chose freedom. He allows awful stuff to happen for now because it’s the only way to win the war without destroying our freedom. That means the suffering we endure in this world is, to God, actually preferable to the alternative of losing our freedom.

I guess even God must sometimes choose the lesser of two evils. That’s why He allows awful stuff to happen.