“If God is good, why does He allow bad things to happen?”

The Lord Jesus Christ is my redeemer. What that means is that He is my rescuer, my savior. There is a sense of recovery in that meaning so we may think of Christ as buying back, or fixing what we have broken.

We are created with the capacity to choose and our choices are often bad, leading to bad behavior, a bad environment and bad health.

When we find ourselves in this situation we may expect the same thing the Jews expected 2000 years ago. A powerful king who will ride in and prevent the evil of the world from occurring. Who will prevent us from hurting and killing one another, who will prevent us from getting sick or injured.

Oddly enough we don’t usually expect that same powerful  king to require our fealty, our submission and obedience, that is we are unwilling to relinquish our right to choose.

Fortunately what we get is a Redeemer, who buys back the result of our bad choices. The choices are made, but the game is changed. Death is swallowed up in victory. When Christ rose from the dead and redeemed eternity He provided hope for the pain, faith for the loss and confidence in the result. This savior who gave His life for us elicits our fealty precisely because He did not require it.

Now, life after death cannot be proven, anymore than it can be refuted. So, coincidentally(?) it boils down to a choice. We can choose to let our choices be redeemed or we can choose not to, but it is just a choice, like any of the other choices we are required to make. And we are required to choose because the choice is to stay as we are or change.

If we would make an informed choice we can look at the likely outcomes. If we choose to believe, we choose hope, we choose faith, we choose purpose and meaning, we choose love. In a word we choose life.

If we will not believe we ultimately choose to reject those things. If there is no life after death, then this world and life are all there is. If this life is all there is then god does NOT have ultimate power. When innocent people die by the hand of the wicked it makes Christ a liar when He says, not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul.

In that case the best we can hope for is a godless universe, because a god that cannot redeem is just someone else who can kill us. Hope in a godless universe is false, faith is meaningless, love is precluded, death is assured, we are choosing death.

As Pascal observed if we choose death in a universe where there is a living Redeemer we have lost everything. If we choose life in a godless universe we have lost nothing.

The living God admonishes us: Choose life.