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How could a good God...?

by James Barringer  
10/22/2009 / Christian Apologetics

I'm sure we've all heard, or thought, a phrase beginning with "How could a good God allow" all the strange and terrible things that happen in the world. At a time in history where a billion people live in hunger, maybe as much as half the world's population live in poverty, tens of thousands are in sexual slavery, and millions live under repressive dictatorships, it's at least worth wondering where God factors into all these things. The presence of all that stuff on earth leads a lot of people to believe that a God does not exist, and if he does exist, there's no way he can be good.

I want to argue that this line of thinking is redundant and misguided. If you really want to make the case that God is sadistic, all you need to do is observe the fact that he's inflicted us all with life.

Yes, life. God plants us here on earth, wedged into a sinful body, and we can't ever stop doing the bad things that we don't want to do. From the time we're born till the time we die, we're locked into a tug-of-war with a part of ourselves that doesn't want to do what we want it to, and we can't vanquish it. Our bodies are fragile; they get sick and need expensive medical treatment. As we get older, the rate of decay only increases, till our eyes can't see as well, our joints get stiff and won't move, we forget things we used to take for granted, and when we reach the apex of uselessness, our body gives out and we die.

We're shackled to this fallible body, and we have to eat to keep it going, but we have to eat the right things in the right amounts or our body breaks. We have to spend a third of our lives sleeping just to counter the fatigue we build up during a day. We deal with pain, either physical or emotional, on a pretty much daily basis, so often that we can't conceive of what life would be like without it.

We're forced to either watch the death of our loved ones, or else die before they do. We have to witness the shattering of our childhood hopes and dreams on the day when we realize that life will never be all we hoped it would be, when the innocence of playing with toys in the backyard gives way to the mundane tedium of paying bills and cleaning the house. Pets die, friends move away and desert us, loved ones let us down, and here we are, stuck in this life, with no way to escape except for death.

Forget poverty and hunger. If you really think God is good, explain all THAT.

The explanation is actually quite simple. This life was never meant to be the crown jewel of our existence. God allows the bad to exist on earth because there's a better eternity waiting for us, and it will be so glorious that it makes anything that happens on earth bearable.

I really don't think the worst aspects of life, the things that people point to and ask how God could allow them, are any worse than the regular aspects of life that we take for granted. I'm not sure that a life of poverty in a community of people who love each other is that much worse than having a dull, monotonous job in corporate America, where your boss and customers and co-workers all try to take advantage of you and treat you like you're unimportant. I'm not sure that a life of hunger is worse than growing up in a single-parent household not knowing whether your father loves you. If someone is really looking to blame God for stuff, they don't need to look at Africa. They just need to look down the street.

Things like poverty and injustice are terrible, and God definitely does not delight in them; he spends much of Isaiah and the later Psalms instructing his people to pursue justice and provide for those who are in need. He does care about the state of our earthly happiness. Jesus is a great example of this; he cared for people's earthly needs, healing those who were blind, feeding five thousand who were hungry, even turning water into wine just so someone's wedding wouldn't be ruined. I don't mean to say that God cares about eternity and not at all about earth.

But the fact of the matter is that this earth is not at all the way he intended for life to be. When he made the earth, it was good (Genesis 1). Our rebellion against him is what introduced all the anger, greed, and injustice that we now look to blame him for. He permits us to live in this state, and he expects us to bear it, because he knows that the pain will someday cease.

When people ask how God could allow these things to exist on earth, they're subtly projecting their beliefs onto Christianity. These are people who often do not believe in heaven or eternity, so for them, there is nothing apart from earth. If earth was really all there was, and God allowed things like sexual slavery to happen on earth, then it's hard to explain how he could be good. But earth must be understood in light of eternity. This existence is a temporary blip. If you drew a line a thousand miles long representing the length of eternity in heaven, this life on earth would not even be a dot at the end of it.

The fact is that heaven will be beautiful, so incredibly beautiful that we here on earth, mired in the sin and disappointment and pain and decrepitude, cannot even fathom what it will be like to live without those things in our lives. The agony of this life is nothing more than the labor before childbirth, the scraped knees and burning thighs on the way to the top of a mountain before looking around at the most beautiful landscape you've ever seen.

How could a good God allow poverty and exploitation and genocide? I would ask, how could a good God allow life at all? The answer, and the thing that makes him good, is that this life is not all there is. He freely, generously, offers his forgiveness and his salvation to all who will accept it, because he craves a relationship with us, both in this life and in the eternity to come. We were made to know peace, love, and tranquility, and we can only have those things when we have been resurrected into new bodies that no longer struggle with sin. Jesus said the same. "In this life you will have troubles," he warned his disciples in John 16, "but take heart! I have overcome the world."

Again, I do not mean to downplay these real, global issues, and the Bible instructs us quite clearly that we are to be at the vanguard of providing justice for the exploited, help to the impoverished, and the love of Christ to all who need it (which, really, is all people). But I also have to side with Paul when he says, in Romans 8, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." If we understood eternity, we would say the exact same thing.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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