The Bible Study Podcast, episode 34. Today, the Bible Study podcast starts dealing with the difficult

question, why do bad things happen to good people?

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. Back at the end of July, I got an email from Lou, who had written to me to encourage me when I had taken a hiatus last year, and then he was writing back with a suggestion for a topic.

Lou wrote, I wanted to take the opportunity to suggest a topic for your podcast that may or may not fit into what you envision the podcast to be.

The topic that troubles me, and I suspect many others, is the age-old question of why God allows bad things to happen to good and or innocent people.

Come to think of it, this could be a whole series of podcasts.

The reason why I'm asking is that I live in the Northeast where a horrible homicide of a family took place not far from me. You may have heard about it on the national news. It involves a home invasion and a triple murder in Connecticut. This tragedy brought back a lot of feelings I had just after September 11th, and it challenges one's faith. We have all had to find

some sort of explanation for these evil acts in the context of faith, and I'm just not sure I'm

as secure as I should be on this question. Anyway, if you think it's something you might want to

cover in the future, it may provide some guidance to many, maybe a series of Bible sections that address the issue.

What do you think?

Well, obviously, the fact that I'm reading that letter means I think that it sounds like a really difficult thing to do,

but I'm going to give it a try.

And I figure that this is either going to end in something that you find useful that you tell your friends about the Bible study podcast,

or you're all unsubscribed

and I won't have to worry about spending time doing this anymore. So either way, it seems like

it could be a win-win there. What I am planning is a series of podcasts on this and so no

podcast will certainly be complete by itself.

And I'm also not expecting that I'll get to the end and you'll feel like I've answered all your questions.

But hopefully I'll have given you some tools to deal with it.

So let's start with the basics.

Let's start with sin.

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