If God exists...

...Then why do bad things happen to good people? And why do good things happen to bad people? It seems when it comes to God and the things he’s “in control of” if he’s all powerful then “why did he allow this to happen?” “Why did he not heal my family member?” 


The question is if God exists…is he good?
So often people who think they’re spiritual and doing a good thing respond to tragedy with “everything happens for a reason”. This implies that either God caused a completely bad thing to happen either to teach us a lesson, to make himself more famous, or to punish someone.


Let me ask a question. Would your dad give you cancer just to heal you and show how powerful he is? Would your dad put you in a car crash to teach you humility? the obvious question is no, accept in the case of those whose parents are especially cruel. But thats the thing. We think that God is that cruel when in fact the bible paints a different picture. Jesus never turned anyone away from healing, never turned anyone away from his love or his provision.


So why do we not see healing every single time we ask? Why did our request go seemingly unheard? Does God even care? Is he even listening?
Scripture promises he always listens and that He’s always good. Sometimes in the world our picture of how God should act to prove He’s good doesn’t always match up with how things are. We either blame ourselves for not being good enough or we blame God for never being good in the first place and we think he doesn’t love us. This is where we build trust with him. Its hard to choose to trust someone when circumstances in our lives tell us that that person isn’t good. We don’t know why bad things happen.


But we don’t have to accept that it was meant to be that way. We don’t have to blame God for not stepping in. Romans 8:28 says that “he causes all thing to work together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose” thats categorically everyone who is alive. He doesn’t promise that bad things wont happen. But he does promise that when bad things do happen he will get us through them. He will make a way for this thing to not kill us or destroy us. He promises to, if we trust him to lead us to the safest possible outcome. God is the only God promises to take an inherently bad situation and make something good come out of it. He isn’t in control of everything because we have the ability and freedom to make our choices, but he remains in charge. Sometimes there isn’t an answer why something happened other than…maybe we just live in a broken world tainted by evil and one day it’ll be made new.