Considering that today's Good Friday, and in light of the discussion in my English narrative class that I mentioned yesterday I thought that today I would write about the reasoning I've been taught to explain why or how God could allow bad things to happen. The main problem, as most people see it, is that God is supposed to be loving and good, and so they can't understand how a loving and good God could allow suffering and bad things in the world.
Of course, people who ask such a question never realize its full implications; if God was to eliminate the bad in the world,there would be no one left. Yes, God is good and God is love, but He is also perfect. Being perfect, He cannot tolerate any sin, any imperfection; to Him there are no degrees of evil, lying, hating, killing, all are equally unacceptable in his eyes. What's more, His standard perfection does not only apply to our outward actions, but also to our inner thoughts; hating a person and wishing him or her dead is the same as carrying the thought out and committing murder in terms of its "evilness." This is a thought that disturbs us greatly--putting lying on the same level as theft or murder?--so we tend to ignore it. Imagine that you are an incredibly picky person who requires a blank sheet of white paper; you want it to be completely blank, so perfect that even a small pencil mark, a dot only, really, would give you cause to reject it. So does it make any difference if there is only a speck on the sheet or if the whole sheet is scribbled on, when in either case you wouldn't take that sheet of paper? That's kind of the way it is for God, once something has been tainted by sin, he cannot accept it.
So why are any of us here at all? That is the heart of Christianity, the belief that Jesus Christ died and rose again so that His sacrifice of blood and life might cover our sins and make us acceptable once more to God. So if God allows us, the ones who only sin by getting angry at our parents, thinking bad thoughts or saying mean things to live in the hope that we will accept Christ's sacrifice and be saved, He must also allow the thieves, rapists, and murderers live so that they too can have hope for salvation. If God did not allow any sin ever, then we would all be lost, which would have been the case at any rate if not for Jesus Christ coming down to earth to die on the cross. That's what I believe anyway.
