[433 words]
“Why doesn’t God keep children safe? Why does He allow children to die from cancer or accidents?”
These are questions that are often asked in our world. Some people stop believing in God because terrible things happen to innocent children. Sometimes, folks have difficulty understanding how a good and benevolent God could allow terrible things to happen to the innocent children.
Those who ask these questions must realize there are terrible diseases in this world. They came into the world at the same time sin entered. Since the souls that sin shall die (Ezekiel 18:4), diseases entered the world at the same time as death. When Adam and Eve sinned, they could no longer maintain their home in the Garden of Eden, nor could they maintain their immortality with God.
Children are affected by disease because all human beings are. It is inconsistent to think that children would be given immunity from death when they are, after all, human beings subject to disease and death.
What about children who are killed in accidents? Why doesn’t God prevent those deaths? The answer to both questions may sound oversimplified. Accidents happen. While accidents can be prevented, humans are always going to make mistakes and there will always be accidents. How can God prevent us from making mistakes when the free will he gave us guarantees we will do foolish things?
Innocent children die from the actions of undisciplined tyrants and evil men. Why can’t God prevent this? Again, the free will men have permits them to do some pretty horrible things to children. Yet, it is not God’s will that anything evil would happen to them. These things are a part of man’s will. God offers all mankind his way and the peace that comes with it. God told Judah, ‘Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, The Holy One of Israel: ‘I am the Lord your God, Who teaches you to profit, who leads you by the way you should go. Oh, that you had heeded my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Your descendants also would have been like the sand, and the offspring of your body like the grains of sand; His name would not have been cut off nor destroyed from before Me'” (Isa. 48:17-19 NKJV).
Whenever human beings begin listening and obeying the Lord God, spiritual and temporal peace will be ours. Until then, we must remember that almost all of the evil in the world is the product of man’s disobedience, not God’s will.
John Henson
Grand Blanc church of Christ
Grand Blanc, MI