When faced with the difficulties, traumas and tragedies of life, it’s convenient for us to try to make some sense of them - even to find comfort - by falling back on ideas like ‘these things are sent to try us’, ‘this was meant to be’, ‘it’s all part of life’s rich tapestry’, ‘God did it to fulfil some other greater purpose’, or even ‘God did this to teach us something’.

That’s all very well if the tragedy is not too large, or if we’re just talking about the idea of suffering - we can gain some comfort, stick a plaster on, and time will heal.

But what if a child is born with massive brain damage?  What if she can’t speak, can’t hear, can’t see, can’t understand, can’t eat.  What if that child then suffers the pain and discomfort of epileptic muscle spasms?  What if the child becomes ill easily and the parents are constantly worried that this could be the sickness that ends her life?  And what if it is the sickness that ends her life, after only three and a half years?

God isn’t like that.

The trouble is that we’ve been taught some wrong ideas.  The very fact that those sayings mentioned above are used when we need comfort demonstrates that the ideas behind them have to some extent become part of our culture.  The ancient Greeks, and parts of the church, have taught us that God is almighty in the sense that he’s in total control of everything that happens everywhere at all times.  If He’s in control, then everything that happens - good, bad and indifferent - must be His doing.  His fault.  He even knows what colour socks I’m going to wear tomorrow - he has pre-determined it from the beginning.  Why don’t you try and trick him in the morning?

God isn’t the only person in the universe.  There’s you, and me, our families, friends, millions of others that we probably don’t know, and there are spiritual beings too.  We all have the propensity for doing good or bad things.  We are all free to choose whether we do good or bad things.  Genuinely free.  God isn’t trying to make us think that we’re free when in fact we’re being controlled by him.  If we weren’t free to choose good or evil, we wouldn’t be able to choose either.  Nothing would be good or bad, nothing would be right or wrong, we would not be able to love or hate.  And without a God who gives us that freedom, we wouldn’t know the difference anyway.

God is totally loving.  Just look at Jesus - his birth, life, death on the cross, resurrection, ascension, and promise to come back again all demonstrate this extremely clearly.  Would a God that is like Jesus cause a little girl to suffer in the way that Abby did?  Would it be consistent with his character,  since his major activities during his natural life were to go around healing the sick and freeing people from demonic pressure, and to teach his friends to do the same?  Would he do it it to teach her, or us, a lesson?  You or I, even though we’re not God, wouldn’t be that harsh.

So it really isn’t fair, but it would be unfair of us to lay the blame at God’s door.  He’s just not like that, which begs the obvious question ‘Who is responsible for evil?’

There are some people, and some angelic beings, that have chosen to be not quite so loving as God.  In fact, Satan - the devil - is the most hateful creature that you could ever imagine.  He hates people.  He hates children.  He hates Jesus.  And he tries to destroy them.  He causes sickness and disease, makes wars start (with our help of course), breaks up good relationships, causes heartbreak and death.  Jesus himself said that the devil comes to ‘steal, kill and destroy’.  He loves us to think that he doesn’t exist.  The kind of evil that destroys people - children - is, in the end, his doing, even if it is administered through other angelic beings, and/or other human beings.

It’s easy to dismiss the idea of a ‘devil’, probably because of the caricatures that have been around for hundreds of years, and because of scientific rationalism.  But it boils down to the fact that God has created both human and angelic beings, and given both moral freedom.  Many eastern cultures have a strong cultural belief system involving spiritual beings, a spiritual world which forms a backdrop to the world that we normally see, and an understanding that what goes on in this spiritual world effects and is affected by what happens in our natural world.  The devil or the satan of the Bible is portrayed as one of these beings who had been given delegated responsibility for the world we live in.

So yes - it really isn’t fair.  It is especially unfair when children are damaged, when people are murdered and abused, when genocide takes place, when people are tortured, when life-threatening sickness comes.  As we know, this list could go on and on.

But God doesn’t just sit back and watch.  He intervenes.  He interacts with angels and humans to counter, come against, and in the fulness of time, defeat evil with weapons of love.  His victory was inaugurated in Jesus the man - God in flesh and bones - when he became as vulnerable as a little child, demonstrating to us that his intention was not to weald harmful power over us, then lived, taught, healed, laughed, wept, suffered, and was crucified because of the free moral will of men and angels that He had given in the first place.  And even death itself was overcome.  No-one had a right to keep Jesus in death, it had no hold on Him.  And He has invited us to join Him in that resurrection for an eternity.  Not only that, but He wants us to join Him in the fight for His kingdom to hold sway in the earth, so that the conditions can be right for Him to return as King.  On that day there will be no more crying or pain, and he will wipe away all the tears.  Even Abby’s.  Even ours.

He let it happen because he gave others the freedom to act outside of His will.  There is no other way that love can be genuine.

 

I know that this explanation leads to lots of other questions about God, evil, suffering etc, so it’s an inadequate answer in many ways, especially since I’m not a particularly good theologian.  But I wrote it down in response to what we’ve seen happen with Abby, because these are the kinds of issues and questions that tend to come up when such a tragedy occurs.  So maybe it will provoke some thought.  I have provided some links to other articles and information below about the nature of God and the warfare worldview.

Recommended Reading:

The Bible - read one of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) in the New Testament to find out what God is like.