Trust God!

“It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here ahead of you.” Genesis 45:5

The convoluted story of Joseph, who rose from being sold as a slave to the second most powerful man in Egypt, shows how God’s plans can be amazing and wonderful. “You intended to harm me,” Joseph told his guilty brothers, “but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20) 

Many people cannot understand why God who is so powerful and good does not always intervene when there is pain and suffering. Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, insists in his belief that we live in a universe of blind physical forces, that some people get hurt, others get lucky, and we won’t find any rime or reason, or any justice. He attests that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we expect, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, “nothing but blind pitiless indifference, DNA neither knows nor cares, DNA just is, we all dance to its music.”

On the contrary, as Christians, we believe that God is good and powerful, that we can trust Him. He has not remained distant from human suffering but He became a part of it as He hung on the cross. And just as He used Joseph’s travails to save many lives, He uses the evil in the world, the cancers, the natural disasters, the famines and wars, to bring the maximum number of people freely into His Kingdom to find salvation and eternal life. As William Lane Craig said, “God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil in the world.”