Hope in Life’s Toughest Times

On December 14, 2012, as Americans prepared to enjoy another Christmas season, a tragic story from Newtown, Connecticut, stopped a horrified nation in its tracks. On that fateful Friday, a crazed gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and methodically took the lives of twenty children and six adults. In only moments, twenty-six innocent lives were snuffed out. But years will not erase the pain of grieving families and the consciousness of the nation will never be the same.

What a tragedy! Deep within the fabric of our beings, we cry out, “Unfair—this is unjust!” And we are right. This incident was incredibly unfair. It should not have happened. But there is a deeper question we ask: “God, where were You in all of this? Why didn’t You intervene? Why didn’t You stop this horrible tragedy?”

If God is so good, why is the world so bad? If God is all powerful, why doesn’t He do something about all the suffering in our world?

These questions are not new. They have been asked for centuries. They are asked by the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, by men, women, and youth of all ethnic groups and nationalities. These eternal questions are echoed in each of our hearts, and they demand credible answers. They will not go away by ignoring them. They cannot be dismissed by pretending they do not exist. We may stuff them away in the back corners of the closets of our minds, but when disaster strikes, they demand answers once again.

It is helpful to know that we are not alone when we ask these questions. Millions of other people are asking them too. It is also helpful to know that God invites us to ask them. The God who created our minds invites us to use them as we contemplate life’s great questions. In three incredibly broad strokes, the Bible presents simple but profound answers to the questions of God’s justice and love in a world of inequity and injustice.