Sometimes kids ask the best theological questions.

I don't know if you have children, if you do, maybe you've heard.

The same questions my kids have been asking, like,

Dad, why does God allow bad things to happen?

And they'll get specific.

They'll say things like, well, you know, why would God create Satan if he knew he was going to be evil?

Or why did God allow Adam and Eve in the garden if he knew

that they were going to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Of course, we can,

you know, think about it in that way, you know, in the distant past, but even in the present,

for many of us, this is a pressing question either because, you know, we turn on the news

or in our own lives.

We experience great suffering, great trials, and we wonder, God, why did you allow this to happen?

That's what we're going to be talking about.

Why does God allow bad things to happen? So first at the outset, I think that we just need to be honest and say, from the perspective of the theologians, I think that the greatest minds who have approached this question, we want to be careful that we don't give the sense that,

oh, there's always a real simple answer here.

You know, the reason this catastrophe happened or this, you know, person was struck with

this disease or whatnot, well, let me tell you exactly why that is.

We don't always know why certain things happen, why certain kinds of suffering are experienced.

We need to affirm, we need to recognize that we don't have the perspective that God has.

We don't know what he knows.

We're limited in our understanding and our perspective as

human beings. And so we have to approach this question with a great amount of humility. Nevertheless,

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