God does not have a reason for everything that happens

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (Romans 8:28)

God does not have a reason for everything that happens. Anyone who thinks he does is worshiping a weird and perverted god. And God is not that. He is good and holy.

There is no reason for rape. There is no reason for cancer. There is no reason for starvation and disease. It came because humanity sinned. That is not God’s fault.

But bad things happen. Why? Is God not in control? He has the power to do just about anything. And he could stop all the bad stuff.

The thing is, though, that he doesn’t. And things that happen to us that are bad are not from God. Yes, he allows those things to happen. But that is not the same.

What is true about all this is that God can take anything, good or bad, that happens and make something great of it.

Anytime anyone says to you that God had a reason for something, you can know that they do not know what they are talking about.

For instance: winter of 2010. We drove up from central MO to preach at the Lincoln church. We drove through a blizzard you could not believe. There were at least ten truck/trailer rigs and around 50 cars in the median in the middle of the freeway. We were going, at one point, only about 15 miles per hour. It was scary. And we were afraid to stop, for fear that we might not be able to start again.

About 50 miles this side of St Joseph, the storm stopped and we were fine. We came into Lincoln carefully because of the ice on the road. But we made it fine with no real problems.

You could say that God was watching over us and that he wanted us here.

But that same weekend, a pastor from here in Lincoln who had a good church and was doing a fine work in the kingdom was driving with his wife from here to Omaha to catch a plane somewhere. He hit a patch of ice, flipped the car and it killed him.

Was God watching over him? Did he like me more than him?

There is the problem. Sometimes things just happen. The entire faculty of the seminary I went to in the 1970’s died in a plane crash. All four of them. And it was over simple pilot error. It left families with young children that had no daddies and  young women who became widows. Why did they die? Was God watching over me in the snow storm, but not over the other pastor here in Lincoln, or over the four good men – better men than I am – when they died?

I don’t have a good answer. But I know that God is a good God. And he can take those things that happen and can make good things from them.

But know this. God is not responsible for the bad things that happen. He does not send them or cause them. Sure, he could stop them. But to do so would entail making us all robots, totally devoid of free will. Because that is what would happen if he removed hatred or evil. He would have to remove love and good. The only time that will happen will be in heaven.

Just know that, if we allow him, God will use all these things to his glory and to our betterment, for lack of a better word. After all, he loves us.