Our Choice and an All Powerful God

Our Choice and an all powerful God
“The evidence is that God is all-powerful. The point to remember is that creating a world where there’s free will and no possibility of sin is self contradiction and opens the door to people choosing evil over God, with suffering being the result. The overwhelming majority of pain in the world is cause by our choices to kill, to slander, to be selfish, to stray sexually, to break our promises, to be reckless.”
                          Peter John Kreeft ph.d
In my years, within the evangelical movement, I’ve heard lots of wild things.  Everything from “you’re sick, so you must have sin in your life” “to your faith isn’t strong enough or God would have healed you.”
Is it any wonder people are turned away from some churches with people saying things like this?
To my mind there is a purpose in us getting sick.  It could be something as simple as us needing to build antibodies, so that we can better fight the next cold. It could be the results of something we’ve been exposed to or that we are genetically predisposed to.  Then again it could simply be a sign that we are pushing ourselves too much and just need a rest.
If the illness takes us into hospital, it maybe to help us get fully healed, or simply, an opportunity to show and share our faith, or as one of my comedian  friends once said, “maybe the surgeon just needs the practice.”
 Either way it should be a call to our spirit to draw closer to God.
All great men and women of God, have gone through test and trials.  Abraham, Noah, David, Joseph, Paul, all of the Disciples, Job, even Jesus.
Some of my Charismatic friends would say God wants us to be healthy all the time. I am sure that is true. What father wouldn’t want his child to be healthy all the time.
The thing is we live in a fallen world.
Genesis records,
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” 
                   Genesis 1:27-28
The problem is man over the centuries has not been a good steward of the world God has given him.
Man has partly out of ignorance, partly out of avarice, and at times deliberately damaged the world we live in.
In so doing he has set in motion things that make us sick, or that even kill us outright.
Case in point.
One place I lived in Northern Ontario, a once gold mining village sits by a lake you can not drink from. The reason it is filled with arsenic, a deadly poison that was used to refine the gold. A lot of the land around that lake is also polluted with arsenic also making it unusable. All because someone was so focussed on getting a few gold nuggets from the land and the government didn’t regulate what was happening. With neither party bothering to look after land.
This is happening all over the world. Man has fallen far from the ideals God set out for him. He has gone his own way and fallen into sin.
Sin is simply falling short of what God wants for you. The thing is we have to acknowledge God and our sin. We have to go before him and admit we are human and fall short of his perfect will every day.
God in sending Jesus to this earth understands what it is to be a human being. What it is to live on this earth with all its temptations. He knows we cannot be good enough to stand in front of him. That’s why he sent Jesus.
Jesus himself left us with this statement,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” 
                                                                                                                John 3:16-18.
Think about it.