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In the overview of this series on "Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People", we confirmed that the Scriptures clearly say God is good and yet bad things happen to people. We realized that personal virtue or lack thereof has nothing to do with whether bad or good things happen to each of us. And we learned that none of us have enough virtue to earn favor with God anyway. So, how do we reckon the fact that a good God could allow bad things to happen to His beloved creation?

Introducing Free Will

The best way to understand the difficulties we all encounter would be to consider the issue in context. Jesus states in John 14:15, "If you love me, keep my commandments." Jesus says this because we have the freedom to choose to love Him or not. We have the freedom to choose to love Him by keeping His commandments or to reject His lordship by doing something else. It is our choice. It was our parents' choice as well. All the way back through to the beginning of mankind, we have had this choice: Love God and keep His commandments or don't.

The first place where we see mankind making a significant choice is in Genesis 3 where man and woman decide to disobey God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This was their free choice. But God knew they were not prepared to deal with this knowledge, so God gave them good instruction before they made the choice, as any loving parent would give: "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:16-17)

God did not want Adam and Eve to choose evil by disobeying Him and so He clearly warned them to obey. Perhaps it may be said that Adam and Eve did not grasp what the warning meant since nothing had died before Adam and Eve disobeyed.¹ Perhaps God gave them further understanding, we don't know. But whether He did or not, He gave clear instruction and Adam and Eve chose to not obey and instead do what was forbidden. This introduces the biggest challenge with free will: one is free to make a choice but one is not free to choose the consequences.

Free Will Affects Others

Consider Abram (later, Abraham) who was told by God that he would be the father of many nations. Unfortunately, his wife, Sarai (later, Sarah), was unable to have children. Abram made the decision to fulfill God's prophecy on his own and lay with his wife's servant, Hagar, and have offspring by her. One bad decision and billions of consequences. You see, God eventually enabled Sarah to have a child. Eventually, the son of Hagar, Ishmael, became the father of the Arab nations and the son of Sarah, Isaac, became the father of the Israelites. Besides God, who could have foretold that one deed of outside of the will of God would have such worldwide consequences?

Adam's decision to disobey God was something called sin. Now that sin was in the world and in the mind of mankind (through the knowledge of good and evil), the effects of sin also permeated all creation. Decay, desease, destruction, and death immediately began - and it continues through today. "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-" (Romans 5:12)

Abraham. Adam. You. Me. Everytime we do something among other people, it affects someone else. If we do good, it affects someone else. If we do bad, it affects someone else. It would be impossible to engage free will and not have consequences. Remember, God gave us free will so that we could choose Him. When we do not, it is guaranteed that bad things will happen.

Why Allow Free Will?

When considering the dire consequences of choosing sin over obedience, people often wonder why the choice of sin was even provided by God in the first place. After all, they propose, God could have avoided all this mess by simply not allowing people the chance to sin. At first, this seems to be a fair question, but is it really right to blame God for man's decision to sin? Of course not.

We must remember that God's desire is to have a two-way love relationship with each person. He chose to love us and He wants us to choose to love Him. The the only way that man could choose to love God would be to have something else as an option to choose. (Choosing something when there is only one choice is really no choice at all. For example, if I were to offer you a choice in dessert, vanilla ice cream or vanilla ice cream, you could rightly wonder aloud, "Where is the choice?")

As previously stated, God is love.² God is light.³ God is true.⁴ God is faithful.⁵ God is good.⁶ To choose something besides God means to choose something that is not any of these things. Only evilness itself is absent of all good things. This is why evil was permitted as a choice. Unfortunately, given the choice between good and evil, mankind chose evil.

We can conclude this section by noting there are consequences to the volitional choices of people. Some of these consequences are not good. Probably the most egregious and disturbing news stories you will hear are the result of a person or persons intentionally using their free will to disobey the living God. When you encounter these news stories or perhaps even have personal encounters with bad things happening because someone(s) made a bad decision, remember that these are not what was desired or intended by God, but are the consequences of not choosing to love God.

The next section explores how evil things happen to people when there was no apparent intentional act that would cause them.

Next: Why Do Bad Things Happen - Sin