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Why Did God Make This Happen?

Hurricanes and other natural disasters, deaths of friends and loved ones, the loss of property, failing health; the number of troubles each of us faces on a daily basis is as staggering as it is difficult to deal with those problems. A very large number of Christians have at one time or another asked themselves, “Why did God make this happen?”

The simple truth and the answer to the question are that God didn’t make it happen. If a person honestly thinks that He has caused their problems, they don’t have a clear idea of who God is.

As put in James 1:17, New Living Translation:

“Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow.”

The King James Version of the bible puts it this way:

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

Notice that James, the brother of Jesus, doesn’t say that some of the things that are good or perfect come from God, he says “every” as in “all”.

If all good things come from God, by extension it means that no bad things come from God. The trials and troubles we all go through didn’t come from God, they come from the deciever. However, God can and does turn bad things around so that good comes out of them.

This is an important point. When bad things befall us, we tend to only see a tiny portion of the picture. We focus only on how it affects us, personally. None of us is even capable of seeing all of the ramifications from any event. God does see all possible outcomes for any event. Incredibly good things can come out of horrendously bad events.

Romans 8:28 (New International Version) says:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

It should be noted that God loves everyone, but not everyone loves God.

Could God prevent bad things from happening to us? Of course. He created the universe and everything in it, from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the largest star in the biggest galaxy. Nothing is impossible for God. (Luke 1:37, Matthew 19:26)

Why doesn’t he prevent it? Because it would violate promises that He made. It would also prevent free-will. The defiler is free to cause bad things to happen until Judgment day. Rather than preventing bad events, God uses them to cause good things to happen. In fact, often those good things wouldn’t have happened if the bad event hadn’t occurred.

It can be difficult for people to grasp, mostly because they can’t see the big picture in its entirety. God doesn’t have that problem. It only makes sense that we should trust in Him completely. Too often, we don’t. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else and when I start relying on myself, my abilities, and my knowledge, the inevitable outcome is failure and more trouble.

Before asking why God made something terrible happen, we need to realize that God only ‘makes’ good things happen. Instead of lamenting our troubles, we should be giving thanks for the good things each of us have and that happens to us every day.

We have an awesome God who loves us dearly. God defines love.

When was the last time that you simply stopped what you were doing and took the time to think of the many good things that happen to you every day? When was the last time you offered a prayer of thanks for those good things?

Remember, all good things come from God.

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What do you think?

Written by Rex Trulove

13 Comments

  1. I feel so differently than all others about this. I don’t think the plan is to change the earth and the things that happen. I think we are here to experience these things so as our spirits move on we have wisdom and experience.

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    • That is one of the ways that God turns the negatives into positives. Although He doesn’t cause bad things to happen, He can use those bad things to shape us and to cause good things to happen. That also comes with the understanding that not all things that we consider good really are good and not all things we think are bad really are bad.

  2. Defining “good thing” as “something that comes from God” sounds like a self-defining proposition to me.

    I find the gospel according to Richard Dawkins to be a lot more convincing!

    • It *is* self-defining and should be. God *is* love and everything he does is perfect and good. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything that people think is good is, in fact, good. We get into trouble the moment we start relying on our own knowledge, which is always faulty. Still, some things are inherently good and they are thus from God.

      • But the problem with assuming the truth of the thing you wish to prove is that it will convince no-one who is not already convinced!

        You could argue that “God is love” is the same as “Love is God”. In other words, God only exists when one person demonstrates love for someone else. However, I have a feeling that that definition will not satisfy you!

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        • John, reread the first paragraph. The last sentence reads, “A very large number of Christians have at one time or another asked themselves, “Why did God make this happen?” By definition, Christians believe in Jesus and God. Scriptures were used to back up the assertions that were presented. You are welcome to use scriptures to counter the statements that were made if you wish.

          1 John 4:8 says that God is love. The premise that this would be the same thing as love is God might work if a person understands that love exists even when there are no people around to experience it. That would be necessary since God existed before everything else and created everything else except Jesus and the Holy Spirit (see Genesis).

          It also needs to be understood that the bible talks about four kinds of love. They aren’t the same and the love associated with God is agape love. This is the highest form of love and it is one that few people experience in a totality.

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          • The problem with all religions is that they start with assumptions and have no real answer to give when those assumptions are challenged. For example, to assume that all the answers are contained in the Bible only works if you accept the authority of the Bible. But suppose you do not accept that authority, because the Bible is so self-contradictory that it could not possibly have been the inspired work of a single mind, divine or otherwise?

            At heart it all depends on the lens you use to view such matters. I choose to use the lens of pure reason when reading the Bible, believing absolutely nothing that does not stand up to scrutiny, be that historical, literary, or whatever, and not being influenced by any notion of the supernatural. The Bible then becomes an absolutely fascinating set of documents that – in the words of Mark Twain – “has noble poetry in it, some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies”.

            You can tell that the New Testament writers were profoundly influenced by the Greek world, which is where the four types of loves originated. The Greeks had their own religious notions, which were obviously pre-Christian and would be deemed “Pagan” by most people, but they also had a highly-developed sense of morality and – as we have seen – very clear views about what love meant. So why was it thought necessary to replace Greek mythology with Judaeo/Christian mythology? At heart, they are both mythologies – there is absolutely no reason to believe that one is more true than the other, but that does not mean that they do not have important lessons to teach about human relationships and much more besides.

            I can accept Christianity as a moral philosophy, but that is as far as it goes!

      • Our knowledge is always faulty? I think that statement needs a bit more explanation, because it simply isn’t true at a number of levels. Are you really saying that no human knowledge about anything can be trusted to be accurate?

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        • The problem isn’t with the knowledge, it is with man’s understanding. When a man starts relying on himself as the cornerstone, he’s doomed to failure. We see that every day when new understanding and new knowledge changes our perception old understanding and knowledge. Put in another way, facts don’t change but our understanding of the facts does.

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          • Doomed to failure? Surely just as much misery and carnage has been caused by people believing that they were acting on behalf of God as by those who did not!

            OK – there are many historical examples of evil non-believers and of political systems that have failed when human reason has been “the cornerstone”, but also many that have assumed divine justification and been every bit as evil. I don’t think this argument can be decided one way or the other!

          • You are proving my point. “Religious people” who rely on their own understanding rather than on God are just as likely to make errors, sometimes very large ones, as anyone else. God doesn’t make mistakes but people do, so people often put themselves before God. That includes Christians.

            The good part is that mistakes and errors can be tremendous learning tools when people see them as such and use them that way. In fact, there are a number of stories in the bible of people who made terrible mistakes because they thought they knew the answer and when they failed and the errors were revealed, it actually caused them to turn to God.

            Even many unbelievers understand the value of learning from mistakes.

          • It is also quite interesting that some people claim that there are contradictions in the bible when there actually aren’t. A number of very spiritual pastors and evangelists started out as atheists who were determined to prove that the bible wasn’t valid, particularly because of the “contradictions”. In the process of discovering that the contradictions they thought that they saw were just a lack of understanding on their part, or due to the difficulty of translating one language into another, they became believers. Some of them have written about their experiences, too.