Anybody have any good suggestions for an answer?
Anybody have any good suggestions for an answer?
The people destroyed in the Old Testament were pedophiles. They enageged in cannibalism and sacrificed their children, burned them alive to the god Molech. They were incestuous, ate their own children, sold their young sons to be boy prostitutues in the pagan temples, and were homosexual gang rapists.
If you are walking down the street and God decides to punch your ticket, who are you to question God ? He gave you that life. It’s not yours, it’s His!
If I may dovetail on this point. If there were innocents who died and they ended up in heaven, then the eternal glory and bliss into which they have been received obliterates any “temporal pain” in the event of their earthly deaths.
I would give different answers depending on the age of your student. For a child I would explain that Pharaoh could have prevented the death of the first born by freeing the Israelites. He had seen the previous plagues over and over as Moses’ prophecies and warning were fulfilled. Likewise, we should be aware of warnings God sends us when we get in the habit of disobedience. Like how one lie can lead to another, and another until we get caught and punished.
The most fundamental question is what is evil for God? Not, what seems evil to us.
Evil, or consequence? God definitely willed Adam and Eve out of the garden - that they should have to work, toil, suffer and die. This was a consequence of their actions. But, these consequences are supposed to bring us to a greater love.
Rather than cry out against God, evil actually cries out for God in at least three ways. First, as just observed, we have no way of knowing something is really evil unless there is a God who established the moral law by which we can judge it to be evil. Second, as every pastor knows, the only real help when someone is suffering comes from God. To whom else shall we turn – He has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). When this life is fading, the only real comfort is the hope of eternal life. As the apostle put it, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor 1:3-4). Third, the only realistic expectation that there will be an end of evil someday is that Christ has already defeated it. Hebrews declares of Christ that “he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb 2:14). The apostle John saw the completion of this process when he wrote, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev.