The NIV 365-Day Devotional Reading PlanSample

How could a loving God . . .

Send a person to hell? Permit sin and suffering? Allow bad things to happen? Part of the answer centers around God’s justice. We have chosen (and chosen, and chosen again) to rebel against this One who causes our bloodstream to operate through no effort on our part. The germs He has allowed our body to resist and deflect in the last two days could easily be enough to kill us if He had not given us — given us, for nothing! — an immune system that fights harmful attackers. The fact is, we do not deserve our next breath. Even though He continues to send rain and sun and corn on the stalk, we have thought badly of Him, or thought nothing at all of Him, treating Him like an unnecessary intrusion into our lives.

So rather than wonder why some will spend eternity in hell, we ought to wonder in grateful amazement why He chooses to rescue any of us. Have we really been good enough to earn His highest rewards? Have we been so devoted to His ideals that He should welcome us with open arms?

Though famine, war, battered wives and children’s hospital wings will always be hard to square and swallow, what we are seeing is the result of life in a fallen world, what human sin has done to our mortal condition. The fall of mankind — the curse of sin that each of us is born with, based on the original sin of Adam — has given evil, decay and sadness a period of time to operate on Earth until they are removed eternally for God’s people at the end of days. Yet even now — even though we have brought so much on ourselves — the Bible teaches us that “in all [our] distress, he too [is] distressed” (Isaiah 63:9). Though we struggle mightily, He is carrying us through. He loves us that much. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38 – 39).

Taken from NIV Game Plan for Life Bible