If God exists, and is both all-powerful and completely good, why did He let my child die?
God does exist, and He IS both all-powerful and all-good. Yet bad things happen even to people who believe in Him, who try to live for Him. These are the most trying times for believers … and the most-often given reason, perhaps, for NOT believing in God.
The apostle Paul proclaimed to a pagan, idol-worshiping world, “This God you do not know, He does exist, and He is our Father.” So that is a good place for us to start examining this God. What do we know of a good father?
We know he will do whatever is withing his power to protect his loved ones from any threatening enemy. He may die trying, but he will keep them safe if possible. However, he may not keep them from ALL “bad things” that might happen to them. A father, for example, might let his bike-riding child fall over after trying to jump a curb or some other barrier. He does not do this because he delights in the painful scrape or bump or even bruised pride of the child, but because so many good lessons are learned by “suffering” the results of the action: lessons about obedience (“didn’t I tell you not to do that?”), lessons about pride (learning not to let our actions out run our level of ability), just life lessons (we fall sometimes; sometimes we hurt; but we survive, we try again, and life goes on). So we can extrapolate that God, a good Father, might sometimes let us hurt, not to enjoy our hurt, but to teach us that we can survive it, even be blessed by it.
A good father provides for his children. He sees that they don’t go hungry. This, however, does not mean the child will never experience ANY hunger. Giving a child a cookie is a good thing… except just before dinner. Teaching a child that a small amount of unsatisfied hunger is okay just before a really satisfying (and far healthier) meal is a good thing, not a bad thing. So we can extrapolate that God might know it is in our best interest NOT to give us certain things we want ever so badly.
A good father delights to give gifts to his children. Yet a good father is also wise enough to NOT give a child everything the child wants. A child given everything it wants is rarely a happy child, but a spoiled child – spoiled for life. So we can extrapolate that God, our good Father, wisely does not give us everything we ask for.
A good father sees things his child cannot. To place one’s body in the way of a chld running to a spotted playground would seem the action of a bully, not a loving father… unless, like that taller, older, wiser father, one can see the car, unseen by the child, that would have killed it had the father not stepped in the way. So we can learn to trust that our Father, who sees so much farther than we can, has good reason to place Himself between us and the thing we see and desire so much.
As we learn to trust this Father through smaller disappointments (no cookie, no playground), we also learn to trust Him for the larger hardships of life. We learn to trust that there is a reason that even big life items we wanted (THAT girl for our wife, THAT desirable job, etc) are denied us. And – here’s the biggest one, the one we could not imagine before our relationship with our Father started – we even learn to trust that a dearly loved one may be taken from us, even a spouse, even a child, all under the Hand of a loving Heavenly Father.
He loves us so much more than any earthly father. He is so much wiser, stronger, and He sees so much farther than our merely mortal eyes can. It is a great thing to have a good human father, and a better thing to trust his heart toward us. Yet it is way better to know our Heavenly Father, and to trust Him in ALL things. He, unlike our earthly fathers, never makes a mistake. He never loves too little, nor is He too weak to help us. When we cannot (yet) see His reasons, we may even so trust His heart. It is tender toward us, and such love – may it draw us from our own limitations and even our doubts, and lead us to a place of absolute trust of the best Father ever known.