Christians tend to get very uncomfortable when unbelievers blame God for bringing tragedy into their lives. Suppose your unsaved neighbor has his daughter killed in a hit and run and the man falls into seething anger towards God, cussing Him out and reaming you out for trying to tell him God is good. Is his theology amiss for accusing God of murdering his child? Not at all. God DID murder the girl and He makes no apologies for doing so. Why then do we Christians start feeling sick to the stomach and make bumbling efforts to try and redirect the man’s anger elsewhere? Do we think it will help the man’s soul to deny God’s sovereign rule over this world? Are we being good witnesses for the Lord by arguing that sin and Satan snuck behind His holy back and did something He hates? This is ridiculous theology, yet over and over I’ve heard Christians try and talk the grieving unsaved out of assigning any responsibility to God for what happens to them.

We can hardly help people know our God when we don’t even know Him ourselves. In Isaiah 45:7, God says “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these.” Clearly God does not find it insulting to be blamed for something He did, in fact He has always made it clear that He’s the One ultimately responsible for all the suffering in this world. Sin itself couldn’t have occurred without God setting up that one special tree in the garden and giving Satan free access to Eve. We Christians need to stop being so threatened by this notion that God is sovereign over all, and we really need to stop talking unsaved souls out of their good instincts.

It is very correct to fully acknowledge God’s involvement when something terrible happens to us, and if He’s involved, He’s the One we should be directing our emotions at. Encouraging people to redirect their anger away from God is like teaching the wife of an adulterous husband to go have it out with his lover instead of confronting the real source of the problem. Such triangulation is a common practice among humans who are trying to cling to denial and preserve the illusion of something they know no longer exists. We Christians have a long history of clinging to the illusion of a God who never gets His hands dirty with pain and suffering—this is a fantasy which the Bible completely disproves, yet we cling to it anyway. God declares that He creates calamity—how much clearer can He be?