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Day three of question and answer week has a very simple question that I've been asked many times usually by newer Christians as it was this time.  "Why does God allow bad things to happen to Christians?"

It's a question that many believers often ask even if they've been following Christ most of their life.  When the troubling times comes or something doesn't happen as we hoped it would or something goes horribly wrong when we thought everything was fine the first thing we ask is why God would do something like that.  The answer is that the question isn't always that simple and sometimes we need to look deeper than just the basic question of "why?"

For example, Paul writes in Romans 6:23 (ESV) "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."  If someone doesn't choose the Lord, then when something "bad" happens to them it's not God doing anything to them.  They're not His and therefore they're at the whim of the prince of this world who is all about the "bad" and "evil" things.  So they're receiving exactly that which they are chasing after even if they don't realize it at the time.  Someone who doesn't know the Lord can do "good" things or be a "good" person but ultimately they are still under the sway and control of the enemies of Christ. 

I'm using quotes around the words "good" and "bad" because the concept of "good" and "bad" is defined by the world and sometimes that get carried over into the Christian's life where we expect "good" things and also "bad" things that happen to be defined within the world's terms.  When you keep that persepective, it can appear that God does bad things or sinful things and that plays right into the hands of the prince of this world who wants to do all he can to try and make God appear as anything but perfect love and truth.

A Christian needs to keep the perspective that everything we see, everything we are and everything that exists is God's to do with as He pleases.  King David said in Psalm 24:1 (ESV) "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers."  When we say that something is "good" or "bad" we're putting our own perspective on the situation that isn't really applicable because nothing we have or nothing we see belongs to us.  In reality, we have no right at all to put a "good" or "bad" designation on anything that happens to us.

Even if you don't want to accept that the world is really the Lord's to do with as He sees fit to do you need to realize that as a Christian you don't have any rights to your own life.  Remember that Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (ESV) "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price."  That price, of course, was Jesus' death on the cross so that we could have eternal life with Him but that also means that we are owned by the Lord and He can do with us, our families, our houses, our cars, our money, our Wii, our computer, our curling iron, our Latvian stamp collection whatever He wants to do with them.  When we start saying that God is doing "good" things or "bad" things with us we are again saying that ownership of these items is ours and not His.

Look at some "bad" things through the perspective of time.  It was bad that John was sent to the Isle of Patmos but while he was there living he wrote Revelation.  It was a bad thing for Saul to have been persecuting the followers of Christ but had he not done that his conversion wouldn't have been so monumental to the Jews of his time.  The deaths of the apostles certainly were not good things but they built the foundations of the faith.  Jesus' death wasn't what we'd consider a good thing when it was happening but we know the good that came from that!

So when something bad happens and we want to immediately wonder why God is doing something "bad" we need to stop and realize that all is His and in the end that we "know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose."  (Romans 8:28 (ESV))  Try to look at the situation through the perspective of God and realize that He will bring good out of everything including fire, bankruptcy, cancer and even death.