Why does God let the righteous and innocent suffer? I have learned that bad things happen to the innocent because God allows it–for a very specific purpose. It is a tough concept for us to swallow because we would not, of course, do it that way. “Our thoughts are not His thoughts; our ways are not His ways.” But “one event happens to them all” (Eccle. 2:14). And that event is the suffering, usually at the hands of others.
God allows bad things to happen to us so that we will have something or someone to forgive. We are to be like Him; therefore, we need something to forgive.
We have to enter into the mind of God as seen in the scriptures in order to see His purpose, which is to make us His sons and daughters. First, we are born of God. He is our Father. And then the law of harvest says, “Each seed bears its own kind.”
So if we indeed are His children, then we will have to do what He did, which is to forgive. If no one ever wronged us, we would never have an opportunity to forgive someone for the betrayals, lies, cheats, thefts, broken promises, et al, that we suffer at their hands. Even when “acts of God” happen to us, we must forgive this “perceived wrong” that “God has done to us.” If we don’t forgive, we harden into a bitter knot of gall that rises up in the center of our being and ruins us and those around us.
I searched for this answer for 30 years before God was gracious enough to show me. For, you see, I was accused wrongfully by someone that I loved, and it hurt with a pain that surpassed mere heartbreak. This about forgiveness was not learned from a book, for one cannot take this in intellectually. It was a revelation to me one day while I was, as Emerson and Thoreau said, in a receptively transcendental mood.
This knowledge healed me of the pain. “The truth shall make you free.” Free from the wondering why, free from the tricks our hearts and minds play on us, free from the imaginations, doubts, and recriminations.
And so I pass this on to you. Hope this helps. Kenneth Wayne Hancock