I was reading Exodus 12, the chapter including the tenth and final plague against the Egyptians, whose Pharaoh kept promising to release God's people, the Israelites, from slavery, but then changing his mind.
The final plague was the death of all firstborns, both people and animals, of any families that did not honor the Lord. Obviously, this magnitude of death and the resulting suffering is horrifying. I thought as I read, "this is why some people are offended by the Bible and have trouble believing God is good." I also said to myself, as I have before, "I know God is love and I will trust that He is good as long as I don't have all the answers." After all, believing He is bad or absent while there is so much good and intention in the world takes at least as much faith as believing He is good while there is so much bad around.
When I got to Exodus 12:23, it burst open the whole thing for me. It mentions that God won't allow the destroyer to enter the Israelites' houses and kill their firstborns when they smear blood over their doors. Suddenly I realized the mistake in my thinking. I was reminded of a family member who gets shrill about Jesus, saying, "How could God be so awful as to insist that people do that one specific little thing and if they don't they get sent to hell? I wouldn't even want anything to do with a picky God like that." (The "one thing" referred to is trusting in Jesus for salvation).
But what if it's not that we're all being shoehorned into a specific picky action, but rather that we chose our destruction and there's just one way of escape? If you were drowning in the ocean, would you complain that the only way to be rescued was the one rope dangling from a helicopter, and the man who comes down with it, and that's so narrow-minded and it's not fair that there aren't thousands of equally valid ladders everywhere? Would you fold your arms and turn your back on the rope and rescuer until they learn some tolerance? Would you not be terribly happy that you had a chance to live and not die, and eagerly grab the rope with all your strength?
In Genesis, human beings were given dominion over the whole world. Almost the first thing we did with that power is cave to the lies of a crafty enemy. That enemy has no power to lay a finger on us until we cede the power. So when the first humans sinned by trusting the enemy over God, they were ceding the whole world in their care to his dark intentions. Since that time, the world has been under his influence. We gave it over. Now that we've done so, there are no longer an infinite number of ways to do right and be right with God. In the garden of Eden, there were infinite ways to be with God, minus one. The one way to screw it up was to disobey the single rule that He set for the world that He'd designed and maintained and populated by His power, which was simply not to eat from one tree. Every other tree and plant was fair game. And guess what? We broke that one rule. "You had one job..." And we did not do it. So now the tables have turned. We turned them, and then dare to complain that our freedom is being restricted.
The question should not be, "Why does the Lord allow all this bad stuff to happen?" A better question - more puzzling, in light of the weight of sin and rebellion - is, "Why does the Lord protect so many of us so often?" It's no wonder the world is chaotic; we invited the destroyer to run it! Satan is more powerful than we are, but much less powerful than God. When we honor God and ask His protection, we are safe from Satan and he has no chance against us. When the Israelites obeyed God's command to smear that blood in Exodus, they were enlisting God's strength on their behalf, strength enough to resist the destroyer. Rather than, "Why are the others being destroyed?" a better question is, "How did those others live so long in their brazen defiance of God?" This is God's world, after all. It wasn't intended to be run by Satan, or to be run by rebellious humans who set off on their own way and didn't consult God or listen to Him about how best it would be run. Living with no fear of God is the human's default setting, tacitly inviting the destroyer to run your life. Every moment you're alive and keep being given the strength to shake your fist in God's face is another second of undeserved grace, a temporary suspension of the hell you have acted and thereby asked your way into. Not because God doesn't love you, but because He respects your choices enough to allow you to choose who will have dominion over your life. The thing is that it's never actually you who has that dominion. You may have noticed that you don't have complete mastery over your life. A person has dominion over their own behavior, at least on a good day, but no one directs the course of their life specifically enough as to call it chosen through and through. It's either going to be God or Satan in control, since both of them are more powerful than you and they both lay claim to the whole world, with you in it.
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