It is so common to hear this: "If God is so loving and all-powerful, why do so many bad things happen, even to good people?"
If, as proposed in the previous post, the mysterious and the divine are so conspicuously absent from our culture... right away we have a problem. How do we determine what is "bad" or what is "good"? Will we say that human law will tell us what the bad things or happenings are? And, let's see... oh, yes... we did mention good people didn't we? Doesn't that imply that there are bad people too? Who decides the difference?
Obviously, the "yard stick" is relative in our culture today. "Good" is so often measured by what is produced for, or contributed to, the society or community. "Bad" could then be defined as any hindrance relative to the "good".
Regardless of how we measure good and evil, the problem lies in trying to decide this for ourselves. What cannot be explained away, however, is something called natural law.
Natural law is like gravity. Any attempt to deny its existence results in grave consequences. This law puts a rabbit on alert when a wolf is near... and it tells the human heart the difference between what is right and what is wrong.
Consider this... you are standing at the check-out in the grocery store and as the checker hands you the change, you realize that you were given 20 dollars extra in change. Whether or not you tell the cashier and give the money back, the fact that you must make a decision about it tells you that there is a natural law in operation. Furthermore, you will always know deep down that something is wrong if you keep the money, even if you try to tell yourself it's OK. It's the very reason that, if the behavior is observed by someone else, you will come up with excuses... "This is a big store - they won't miss the money." It's simply an attempt to deny that natural law is telling us that something is wrong.
This natural law is a gift from God. Denying its existence or attempting to ignore it is tantamount to denying the existence of, or ignoring, Almighty God.
