If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil by Randy Alcorn

Author:Randy Alcorn [Alcorn, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9781601425799
Amazon: 1601425791
Goodreads: 6626133
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Being slaves to sin does not mean unregenerate people can’t ever make good choices.

Those without Christ are tied to their sin. While they can modify many sinful behaviors, they can’t escape the sin built into their nature. However, Romans 7 says that sinners can’t stop doing evil, not that they can never do good.

Adulterers, thieves, the greedy, and gossipers can all risk their lives to save a child. Without Christ, we remain spiritually separated from God and cannot earn our way to Heaven, but this doesn’t mean we are as evil as we could be or that we lack any capacity to do good.

Does God grant power to his creatures? Yes, the power to choose to get up in the morning, go to work, raise a family, make meals and consume them, paint and sing and laugh and play. He gives us the power to tell the truth or to lie, to cheat on an exam or to be honest.

Does a man have a choice of whom to marry, whether to be faithful to his wife, and whether to protect his child or abuse him? Call it free will, meaningful choice, or anything else, it is God-given and real. If it isn’t, our decisions and our lives are merely illusions.

I began this chapter with the heroic choice Professor Liviu Librescu made, saving the lives of his students on a day when an evildoer killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech. I don’t know whether the professor was a Christ-follower, but I do know on that day, in the face of death, Librescu made a meaningful and consequential choice. What made it powerful and significant is that he didn’t have to do it. He was free to have chosen differently. He made the right choice, and for that his students and their families will always be grateful.

Notes

1. Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, 143.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.