Article November 19, 1990 Issue

Asking the right question brings healing

There's a huge difference between seeking a cause for our problems and seeking to understand what God has to teach us.

Diane S. Staples

Have you ever had a problem that made you ask yourself, "Why is this happening to me? What do I need to learn?" Sometimes those two questions can blur together as if they were essentially the same question phrased in different ways. But they're really two distinctly different questions that point in opposite directions and lead to opposite conclusions.

To understand better the nature of the first question, we need to consider the basic nature of evil. In its opening chapter, the Bible clearly indicates that God is the only cause, the only creator, and that all He has created is good, including man in His image and likeness. Yet, looking around us, we see that evil appears quite real to the material senses—real in the world and real in our lives. How does a Christian reconcile what the physical senses report with the foundational Bible teaching that "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good"?

The people in the Bible certainly had to face this apparently irreconcilable contradiction. Although they trusted in God, the world they faced often seemed anything but "very good." Yet what makes the Bible endure, what still speaks to people's hearts, is its message of the power and ultimate supremacy of good. From the achievements of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets on through to the healing works of Christ Jesus and his followers, evil falls before the power of God, good.

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