
A challenging question for Christians, and an obstacle to faith for non-believers, is why an all-knowing, all-powerful, and benevolent God would allow bad things to happen to good people.
The Catholic Church teaches that bad things are not part of God’s plan. As a loving Father, He created a world without suffering, but because of Adam and Eve’s Original Sin man now lives in a fallen and broken world where bad things can occur.
God’s perfect will results in truth, goodness, and beauty, but because of love for his Creation, God also exercises his permissive will. Unlike an oppressive dictator, He willingly gives up total control of what He has created.
Given the gift of free will, unless man submits to God’s will, God does not keep him from committing sin. Bad things are not punishment for sin, but they do happen as a result of man’s disobedience and the presence of evil.
Natural activities that occur in God’s creation may result in natural or physical evil, but moral evil, which is even worse, results when man abuses his freedom and turns away from God to inflict pain and suffering on others.
God allows bad things to happen because He can create a greater good from even the worst things. The greater good that results from tragic events may not necessarily be easy for man to recognize since only God can determine what is truly good or truly bad.
Bad things may happen to test Christians, helping them to grow in their faith by revealing man’s weakness and his dependency on God. Experiencing suffering can also teach compassion, mercy, and forgiveness.
The answer to all human suffering is Jesus Christ. In response to evil and suffering, God the Father, sent his only Son to take on human nature and suffering. Jesus died on the Cross for man’s sin although he had no sin of his own.
Although Jesus does not take away pain and suffering, He allows man to experience his love and mercy in the midst of it. Having freely accepted his own suffering, Jesus turns any bad thing into a way to bring people closer to God.
God does not make bad things happen:
Bad things are not part of God’s plan:
Adam and Eve’s disobedience unleashed hell on Earth:
But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.
2 Corinthians 4: 7-10
Man is given the choice to freely love or not:
A world with strict justice would not be good:
In time we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures: “It was not you”, said Joseph to his brothers, “who sent me here, but God. . . You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.”178 From the greatest moral evil ever committed – the rejection and murder of God’s only Son, caused by the sins of all men – God, by his grace that “abounded all the more”,179 brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption. But for all that, evil never becomes a good.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 312
God brings greater good out of every bad thing:
There is no good that God cannot bring about from suffering:
Job however challenges the truth of the principle that identifies suffering with punishment for sin. And he does this on the basis of his own opinion. For he is aware that he has not deserved such punishment, and in fact he speaks of the good that he has done during his life. In the end, God himself reproves Job’s friends for their accusations and recognizes that Job is not guilty. His suffering is the suffering of someone who is innocent and it must be accepted as a mystery, which the individual is unable to penetrate completely by his own intelligence. The Book of Job does not violate the foundations of the transcendent moral order, based upon justice, as they are set forth by the whole of Revelation, in both the Old and the New Covenants. At the same time, however, this Book shows with all firmness that the principles of this order cannot be applied in an exclusive and superficial way. While it is true that suffering has a meaning as punishment, when it is connected with a fault, it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment. The figure of the just man Job is a special proof of this in the Old Testament. Revelation, which is the word of God himself, with complete frankness presents the problem of the suffering of an innocent man: suffering without guilt. Job has not been punished, there was no reason for inflicting a punishment on him, even if he has been subjected to a grievous trial.
Pope John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, 11 February 1984
The Catholic faith is based on the Cross:
Jesus suffered even though He did not deserve to:
Jesus was innocent but suffered the most:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
Discovering the fullness of the truth:
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