Some people struggle with understanding why God “lets” bad things happen. The “why didn’t God stop it” question has to do with a lack of understanding about sovereignty and God being in control. If God was “in control” like many say, then God is profoundly evil. It would mean that God intentionally causes rape, murder, and all kinds of perverse and wicked things in the earth. And even if we make the argument that God doesn’t personally perform them but “allows” others to perform them out of His infinite wisdom and grace, then God is basically a sadist, taking pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. But that’s not who God is, what He is like, or how any of this actually even works. God isn’t in control—or at least not remotely how people like to think. And this is actually the best explanation for why God does not stop evil.
The idea of sovereignty as is usually applied to God is that God is sovereign which means He is in control of everything in creation and thus whatever happens goes according to His will. This is inaccurate on multiple points. First, sovereignty has to do with being the highest authority over a domain—and that’s all it means. Note that I didn’t say “highest authority where everything goes his way”. I simply said “highest authority”. God as sovereign simply means that there is no one with a higher level of authority that God. But that doesn’t mean everything goes the way God wants it to.
We can look at earthly examples and see this is true of any sovereign. Kings and emperors are also sovereigns—the highest authority in their domain. If a king makes a decree and not everyone follows that decree, does that threaten the king’s sovereignty? Does it somehow make him less of a king because someone disobeyed the order? Of course not. Someone breaking the royal law doesn’t change the king’s rulership in any way—it simply means that if the king wants his rulership to have any value, he has to set up enforcers throughout his kingdom—those who enforce the rules the king has put in place.
We have only to look to the first three chapters of Genesis and we can see that God doesn’t always get His way in spite of the fact that He is Sovereign over everything in all creation. Adam and Eve disobeyed His instructions in the third chapter of Genesis, and mankind has been disobeying Him ever since, but that doesn’t mean that God’s rulership is threatened. In fact, not only is not threatened, but in Christ Jesus, God has appointed us who were once His enemies (Romans 5:10) as chosen enforcers of His Divine Will in the earth. God isn’t in control and things don’t always go His way, which is where we come in.
Did you know that the Bible tells us that it is largely up to us humans to decide what happens in the earth? Psalm 115:16 says, “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind.” Again in Amos 3:7 it says, “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.” God has chosen to partner with us to influence the earth realm, even to the point that God doesn’t do anything without our involvement in some manner. And this is an important fact to take note of.
God set up laws in the fabric of creation that govern how the multiverse works. God is just, in that those laws govern all creation, He follows His own laws, and those laws don’t care who you are–they are impartial in their function. For whatever reason God gave mankind authority over the earth, and this means that He is bound by that decision as well. If God wants to do things in the earth He has to involve us in some way, so when we think that God hs somehow “allowed” evil, what has in fact happened is that we have allowed evil.
This is a hard pill for some to swallow because it means that mankind, then, is generally responsible for the ills that befall us and not God. It is frustrating at times to be sure, as demons make use of spiritual laws that we are often ignorant of to cause affliction, torment, and ultimately death, loss, and destruction—yet even then, they typically do it with our involvement as well.
For example, if someone has unhealed emotions, then demons use those unhealed places to set up a stronghold inside the person, then they expand their dominion inside that individual. Demons utilize the law of sowing and reaping to attract evil to that person over time through the position of their stronghold, and it works because they are using, even if in a twisted way, spiritual laws to gain “legal” occupancy inside a person. When bad things happen and we perceive that God doesn’t stop it, it’s because demons have expanded the realm of their control inside that person which allows the demons to afflict that person in various ways and ultimately we not only haven’t stopped it, but have made room in our hearts for that evil to exist.
The demonic make great use of the authority of humans in the earth to cause pain and suffering, and they do it by influencing our free will. The Holy Spirit does similarly, influencing us to use our free will to bring life all around us, but He is kind and not manipulative, unlike the enemy. The Holy Spirit invites us into a partnership with Him whereby we can together release transformation into the lives and circumstances around us.
And while we can make the argument that God doesn’t stop evil because it’s our job to, we also need to recognize that God actually stops evil a LOT. We don’t have half of a clue of the many myriad things God has protected each one of us from, but the moment something does make it through, we tend to get upset and blame God for “not stopping” it. No, God gave dominion of the earth realm to us. If something makes it through, it’s our job to do something about it based on the authority He has given us instead of blaming Him for us not adequately taking dominion in our own lives.
This past December we had to put our dog Rowan down. There was a known spiritual component to the problems that led up to the end result, and the entire thing was very upsetting as a result—both because we loved (and still love) her, but also because the spiritual issues that surrounded her death screamed “the enemy won this battle”. While I normally never blame God for anything, I found my own heart tested on this subject, as I found myself thinking from time to time things like “God, why didn’t you stop this?” The truth is that I don’t believe that God is in control and I haven’t for years, but when circumstances come up, it tests what we actually believe and reveals hidden motives in our hearts. God didn’t kill my dog, and He certainly didn’t cause me and my family pain in order to teach me a lesson about persistent subconscious and unconscious beliefs. While God in His infinite goodness certainly works terrible situations like this for my good, He isn’t causing it, isn’t influencing it to happen, and isn’t responsible for it. Humans were responsible for partnering with the enemy to bring harm to my family, and my responsibility lay, at least to a degree, with failing to protect a member of my family.
I don’t say or share any of this to bring condemnation on anyone so if anyone is hearing that from this story I am sharing, that isn’t the point at all (and I don’t condemn myself for it either). I am trying to illustrate that when bad things happen to us, it isn’t because God is permitting evil, it isn’t because we are being tested like Job, and it isn’t because God is giving us a heavy burden to bear because He will only give us what we can handle. All of those are highly erroneous beliefs developed from a poor understanding of God’s nature, and they have no similarity to who God is or what He is actually like.
The Bible says in Proverbs 26:2 that a curse that has no cause cannot come to light, meaning that if there is no access in our lives that negative things cannot have power to influence us. The issue many people have isn’t that a curse is causeless—it’s that we don’t have a clue what the cause is, and assume there isn’t one when the cause is just well-hidden. Many times we don’t know that we have access points for the enemy and the enemy wants to keep it that way. God, however, reveals ways that we can destroy the access that the enemy has in our lives so He can bring us into increasing realms of true freedom. In this process, God also reveals to us the authority He has given us to destroy works of darkness (Luke 10:19) so that we can enforce His abundant life in the earth.
