“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” (II Timothy 3:3-4)
We are seeing these very attributes in our society today. People are murdering innocent children in schools, gunning down audiences at movie theaters, and opening fire on shoppers at malls. The morality of our country has visibly gone downhill, even in the last few years.
Someone recently posted on Facebook: “Having a hard time right now, just trying to understand how we’re supposed to have any faith in humanity when every day there seems to be a shooting or some other tragedy going on? I know we’re supposed to give it up to GOD, but I have to admit I’m struggling….It just seems like this world is so full of hate and violence… Breaks my heart… I guess all I can do it keep praying…”
I answered: We’re commanded in Scripture not to have faith in humanity, who will automatically sin because they are born sinful and in rebellion to God. We must put our faith in God alone. God’s holiness shines in stark contrast to our selfishness. Even as believers we are selfish, so we can’t expect unsaved people to act in a way that is righteous.
Yes, God holds all the molecules of the universe together, and He can stop any event from occurring. But if He did, we would all be robots, unable to make our own decisions. The only reason sin exists is because God gave us free will. And yet God causes every event (no matter how hideous) to be transformed into good for us, even if evil was intended by the people who perpetrated it. God is good. He is good all the way through, with no evil anywhere. That’s what’s so beautiful about God.
God is sovereign. My husband mentioned last night that there are many calamities like natural disasters that we think are evil but aren’t. Over 100,000 people are killed instantly. God gives life and takes it because He is ruler of all, and the giving and taking of life is not sin for Him, because He made us and our days are numbered. All things, evil and otherwise, are divinely orchestrated by God to transform us into His image so that we can experience a closer walk with God. It’s easier to accept the death of a loved one if you understand that their days were numbered before the foundation of the earth, and they lived out precisely the days that God intended for them to live out.
Ultimately God is in control of all things. He knows about and predestines all things that will take place because of our depravity, and He weaves it into a beautiful tapestry. Someone once said that we see the back side of the tapestry, with all the knots and mess, and that when we’re in heaven, we will see the beauty of how God actually controlled even the evil things, setting limits for evil, and creating good out of the evil. And how are we to respond? Trust Him. If you have to understand everything before you trust God, you are not trusting Him. We will never fully understand God because He is infinite. And yet He is good. He commands us to walk in holiness, and we repeatedly rebel against that command. He finally gives us over to our sin until the entire nation collapses like Sodom and Gomorrah.
