Why Did God Allow It? (2)

When tragedy strikes, there is only one honest question we can honestly ask. “Why did the church allow it?”

Unfortunately, we believe in all sorts of lies to wiggle out of this responsibility.

• Bad stuff happens all the time.

• That’s life.

• His sickness was genetic.

• The devil will not be defeated until Jesus returns.

We accept these lies to avoid facing the truth that God has equipped the church with everything it needs to defeat and destroy evil. Evil does not just happen. It happens when we have failed to take up all that God has given us.

Given that God has given us such a beautiful world, and his people all that we need to clean it up and make it into the beautiful place that he intended it to be, we have a bit of a cheek to blame God when it gets into a mess. When we ask “Why did God allow it?” we are saying that Jesus did not do enough on the cross, or the Holy Spirit is not powerful enough, to clean up this world. We are blaming God for our mess. That is a dangerous game to play.

If a Christian man dies young, it is never God allowed it. It is always because the church allowed it. There are many ways that we might have allowed it to happen.

• The Church did not take the gospel to the people who allowed evil to grow up in their midst.

• The church did not put sufficient spiritual protection around the person that came under attack.

• The church did not press in to obtain healing for the person who died.

• The church did not adequately resist the attack of evil that came against him.

• The church allowed him to go into battles that he was not trained to deal win.

• The church allowed him to stand alone, when he need people around him providing protection.

• The church let him forget that there is a battle going on.

So when tragedy strikes, we should stop asking why God allowed it. We should be asking how we allowed it to happen. We should be asking God to teach us what we need to do as a church, to make sure it does not happen again.