Last week I attended the wake of a 21 year old woman who had died several days earlier as the result of an auto accident. Two days after that the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado took place, leaving 12 people dead and over 50 wounded. As sad and tragic as these situations are, sadder still is the inevitable questioning of God. “How could a good God let something like this happen?” “Why doesn’t God do something to prevent these kinds of events?” “Where was God when this happened?”
The best way to answer these questions and all questions of this ilk is to get right to the point. God is not responsible for the free will choices of mankind and some of those choices are sinful. No more than Henry Ford is responsible for every vehicle accident involving a Ford motor vehicle.
God gave mankind free will and God is a respecter of mankind’s free will choices. To ask God to do something about free will is to ultimately ask God to severely limit our free will or take our free will away altogether. The problem with these two options is that both remove from us the capacity to love because love demands the ability to choose.
Maybe your thought is that God should keep free will in place and just intervene in major incidents. This fails to take into consideration what we consider minor isn’t minor to God. God takes all free will choices that are sinful very seriously. We tend to overlook much of the sin in our lives and project onto God that he will do the same, after all “God is love” and a loving God won’t punish me, will he? And what about those free will choices that result in tragedy but aren’t sinful, like the individual who goes out swimming and drowns accidentally? What is God to do, prevent this individual from going swimming? Let’s be realistic about this option, too. How many of us have had to deal with the temper tantrums and attitudes of children who are prevented from doing something because we as parents “know better” or to save the child from the consequences of his/her choices? In such situations the relationship between parent and child splinters and sometimes fractures beyond repair. Do we really believe that this wouldn’t be the case if God were to intervene in this fashion? What kind of love relationship would that be with God?
To take away or limit free will would lead to humanity being nothing more than robots or programmed like computers. Like it or not, God chose to give mankind free will and mankind regularly determines to use that freedom to perform sinful and/or unwise acts. But this doesn’t mean we are without hope. You see God has done something about our propensity to sin or be unwise. He did something in the person of Jesus Christ. Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
We have the ability to walk away from sin and turn to Jesus and should we make an unwise choice that results in the loss of life we can look forward to a life with Jesus in eternity. All of this is made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus. We need only have faith. God has given us hope while maintaining our free will which allows us to respond to his love with love in return.
We must remember that tomorrow is not guaranteed. We go to bed and sleep in the expectation that we will wake up. We talk about what we will do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, when we retire, when our kids grow up, etc. All stated with the certainty that tomorrow is ours and we will be here to live it. We lose sight of the immediacy of life and become complacent. All the more reason to turn to Christ while it is still day.
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