Answering Kids’ Hardest Questions: Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen?

This article is part of the Answering Kids’ Hardest Questions series.

God Is Good All the Time

Why does God let bad things happen? This could be a heartbreaking question that your child asks you. Maybe they have experienced something that’s really awful, or maybe their friend has, and they’re asking you a really deep, hard question. This is a question that scholars have dedicated their lives to researching and writing on. I want to encourage you that don’t have to be a scholar to be able to walk alongside your children in their grief and through their hard questions.

On one hand, we believe that God is sovereign. He is in control of all things, big or small. There are no accidents. He knows all things, so nothing surprises him. But on the other hand, our world is broken by sin, which means that people don’t love God or others the way that they should. And that means that our bodies and minds don’t work the way they should.

But how these fit together in particular circumstances is largely a mystery, and that makes it particularly hard to answer for our children. The story of Job offers us a great comfort. Job asked God his big questions about why these things are happening. But instead of God giving him the reason for his suffering, God gives him himself and reminds him of his character. And that’s the hope and the comfort that we have, that we will be okay because God is with us.

The story of Job offers a warning as well for us parents. Job’s friends presumed too much and proposed reasons for his pain that they didn’t actually know. And we need to be careful to not do that as parents. So when our children ask why God lets bad things happen, we can go to them and say we don’t know why God lets bad things happen a lot of the time. But God is good, he is with us, and he promises that one day he will make all things right.

As parents, we can pray for ourselves and pray for our children, continually pointing them back to truth. We may not be able to appease their desire for knowledge about circumstances, but we can give them a sustaining hope and comfort that is rooted in the character of God and the truth in his word.

Alyson Punzi is the author of He Always Hears: A Story of Loss and the Hope of Things Made New.

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