As someone who’s not a trained biblical scholar, and who is still a deeply imperfect person – a sinner – the last thing I’d attempt to do is give the full song and dance on what the bible says about how God can let bad things happen. I can’t speak for Him, so you could say that I know what I don’t know. I don’t know precisely what happens the moment we die, because I understand that no one does.
All I can tell you is that I’ve contemplated this question for a long time, sometimes when my own faith was tested by life. After seeking out what experts and clergy have said, after reading the works of saints, sinners, monks, ministers, apologists, and priests, I have sought the answer to the question: How can God let bad things happen?
Here’s where I’ve landed. I think we’re posing the question entirely the wrong way. We’re asking the question with this image in mind of an all-powerful God somewhere above us, perhaps far away, removed, detached, watching the world go round and letting evil have its day. Even though we’ve been told since Sunday school that God is everywhere, God is with us, I’m not sure we have a grasp on what that actually means. Like, next to me? Across the room? In the form of an angel, like a guardian angel? What?
It’s important to address the core of these questions, I think, before we can start to understand why God lets bad things happen. It started to open up for me when I quit thinking of our physical selves and started to think of our spirit selves, our souls.
If you’ve ever had a loved one die, and you visited the funeral home, or if you were there in the place where they died and you saw them before and after, you may have been struck with an immediate and instinctive understanding. Before they died, they were there, like in this room. After they died, they — the actual person you knew and loved — was not there. They went somewhere else. Their body was still there, but you knew they were not.
Where did that person go? How did that person go from here to there? Of course, we talk about all of this when we talk about our souls.
Even the phraseology embodies all of this. “He’s no longer with us,” we actually say. And everyone gets it. But again, what is the soul? Where is it? How did it stay trapped in this body until it wasn’t any longer? What is its essence? Does it live on in some other dimension, like Heaven, and we just can’t see it? Can it see us?
Jesus has told us there is a Kingdom of God, and not everyone makes the cut: “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:25)
He’s talked about life everlasting, in connection with all of this, but how can this take place?
When these questions came up for me when I was a knucklehead in the third row of Sr. Charlotte’s class in Catholic grade school, the answers were always trite. “It’s a mystery of faith.” Or, “Only God knows.”
The way I’ve come to try and understand this is that I think the key to it all is the relationship between our souls and God Himself. We’re told in the Book of Genesis, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Does this mean God has two arms and legs, or does it mean the image described in the Old Testament is that of our very souls? That now makes more sense to me.
I imagine that our souls, your soul and my soul and the souls of 330 million other Americans, are all tied in some way to God’s essence. He lends our bodies this piece of Himself for a little while, and at some point, He takes it back. If our soul is deemed worthy, he takes it back to Himself and into His kingdom.
And so when we say, “God is everywhere,” and that He knows everything about us at all times throughout our lives, it’s because our soul was there every step of the way, and through it, He was always there. Not watching us from above or across the room. But rather, He saw the world through your eyes and my eyes. He has felt the joys and the pains of life through us, not apart from us.
God was always with us, perhaps in us, and He has never left us.
Still, as we understand from the bible, thanks to fallen angels and fallen man, even though God is here, and He is with us everywhere, He has still permitted evil to exist. We know that through Adam and Eve, sin entered the world. God gave us free will, and He never took that away, which gives us the power to do good or evil. Free will is a test, one that will determine where our souls end up.
Free will has allowed all the bad things in the world to happen. God doesn’t direct it. But He does allow it, even though He remains a loving and merciful God. When bad things happen here on earth, we may not know how it all ends, but He knows how it will end for everyone involved and for all eternity.
Keep in mind, God allowed His own human-born son, Jesus, to suffer the worst inhumanities.
You may remember the part of the story of Jesus’s crucifixion where a man on one of the other crosses says to Him, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (Luke 23:39) But Jesus does not. He lives as a human, suffers as a human, and in His earthly body, He dies as a human, a state that will last for three days.
If that were the end of the story, our own confusion over this question may be justified. But it’s not. I truly believe that when we die, the soul returns to its source. If that soul has found favor with God, it gets to live eternally with Him in His Kingdom. If it hasn’t found favor, it has another fate. I don't claim to know the process for any of this, and I can't even imagine. I seriously doubt Peter will be standing next to a pearly gate, but I could be wrong.
Regardless, God sees eternity, while we are not able to do so. No matter what happens on this planet, God sees beyond it, so that no matter how much pain and suffering a soul endures in its body on earth, there is a happy ending, one that we mortals just cannot grasp.
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Because God allows free will, he allows things to play out on earth as they sometimes do, knowing that at some point, He will take over, and there will be joy upon that return home to Him. A joy that outweighs any amount of pain and suffering we could experience.
When I see the atrocities that happen every day in this world, and when I read about how horrible man has been to man over thousands of years, the one thing I find reassuring is that when it’s all over, the good souls end up with God, the source of all things, where they will live in happiness forever.
In this spirit, this I believe: No one “rests in peace.” Instead, they live in peace for all time.
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