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- Hello, my name is Eli Ayala, and welcome to Revealed Apologetics Plus. This YouTube channel is kind of an offshoot from my other channel called
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- Revealed Apologetics where I cover a lot of advanced topics such as presuppositional apologetics and apologetic methodology, and there are a whole bunch of content there that you can find that if you're all for it, you can go over there and check it out.
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- But in this YouTube channel, I want to take the time to kind of focus on answering specific questions that would be a great resource for people to kind of just watch a 2, 3, 4, 5 minute video in response to their question.
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- So to that end, without further ado, the first question I want to cover in this video is why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?
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- This is a question that often comes up if I'm speaking at a church or speaking at a school or I'm teaching in class.
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- This will often come up, and it's a good question, and I think it's a question that can be challenging for us to grapple with because I think we really feel the force of that because we live in a world where we see suffering all around us.
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- But I think it's important in answering this question that we kind of criticize the question itself because I think the question is ill -formed, at least from a biblical perspective.
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- And so when we ask the question, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?
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- That's the wrong question. The question assumes, I think, unbiblical categories that it's important for us to kind of point out.
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- I think the real question should be asked is, why does God allow good things to happen to anyone? You see, the original question, why does
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- God allow bad things to happen to good people, assumes that we are inherently good, right?
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- We're kind of these innocent people, we're good deep down inside, and then all of a sudden these terrible things happen to us.
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- I think it's very important to understand that in answering questions like this, we're able to answer them from within a biblical perspective.
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- First of all, the Bible says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All of us have sinned.
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- And so in light of all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, the Bible also says that the wages of sin is death.
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- And so let's think about this logically. If all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death, it logically follows that we all deserve death.
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- Now, we don't all get death instantly, right? There is also this element of God's grace,
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- God's mercy. The fact that we do not experience judgment immediately is an extension of God's grace and mercy.
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- So I think the real question is not, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? I think when we rephrase the question to be consistent more with kind of biblical categories, we're able to kind of appreciate
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- God's grace and mercy on us poor sinners in need of salvation.
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- Okay? Now, as difficult as suffering can be, I think it's awesome. Within the Christian faith, we have this concept that the triune
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- God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the second person of the Trinity, came down to earth and dwelt among us, right?
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- In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh. That's John 1 .14.
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- Jesus came and dwelt among us, experienced suffering, suffered alongside us, was crucified.
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- Okay? The only righteous person to ever be put to death, the only innocent person,
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- Jesus himself, he's put to death and then he's raised on the third day. This is kind of the beautiful picture of the
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- Christian faith. Now think about this, okay? God understands our suffering. He comes as a man, suffers alongside us, right?
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- And in that evil event of the crucifixion, God had a greater purpose that he was accomplishing.
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- And this is very much related to the question that one of the reasons why
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- God allows suffering, and I can't explain every single instance of God allowing suffering, but one of the reasons is that he's accomplishing purposes.
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- And so in the death of Jesus, we see an evil act of crucifixion of an innocent person.
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- We see a great and good thing brought about as a result, the salvation of those who believe.
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- Okay? So why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? Let's rephrase that question and then answer it within a biblical perspective.
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- I think that puts us in a better place and gives some context in terms of how to answer that question, at least begin to answer that question from a biblical perspective.